At times of recession, like we have today, a range of dodgy economic ideas that have been refuted several times over during the last 200 years are recycled with fresh enthusiasm, requiring us to refute them once again.
Chimera 1: prosperity through stealing and spending
Our political masters follow the lead of the economists. Recently we heard this statement from our Culture Secretary, the Rt Hon. Jeremy Hunt MP,
There are people who say that doing a project like this is a massive Keynesian boost to the economy. That is definitely the case, in terms of money being spent.
The message is clear: if we spend money, we will end up getting wealthier. That’s nice and simple then. What are we waiting for? If £39bn of spending is going to create more than £39bn of wealth, we should not be shy! Why not spend £339bn? In fact, choose any number!
It is remarkable that an educated man like Hunt cannot see that if we extract £39bn in taxes from the private sector and give it to the Olympic development people to spend, we have just moved money that people would otherwise have spent on goods and services they actually want, and directed it instead to the government’s preferred expenditure? The net gain is zero, at best.
This was clear enough to Jean-Baptiste Say in 1803, when he wrote A Treatise on Political Economy:
But this advantage is to be derived from real production alone, and not from a forced circulation of products; for a value once created is not augmented in its passage from one hand to another, nor by being seized and expended by the government, instead of by an individual. The man, that lives upon the productions of other people, originates no demand for those productions; he merely puts himself in the place of the producer, to the great injury of production, as we shall presently see.
Say had a great letter exchange with his English contemporary Malthus. Like Hunt today, Malthus believed public expenditure was essential to keeping the economy going. He argued that the payroll of the state — in modern terms, the army of teachers, nurses, civil servants, and quango staff — should be maintained across the economy, for the benefit of all.
Say pointed out that if no extractions were made from the private sector, the public labour force would soon get redeployed. If the tax collector did not collect, no-one would struggle to find better ways to spend their money!
In his letters to Mr Malthus, Say reminds us that spending is only half of the equation. Value must be traded for value, and production must precede consumption:
When I advance that produce opens a vent for produce; that the means of industry, whatever they may be, when unshackled, always apply themselves to the objects most necessary to nations, and that these necessary objects create at once new populations and new enjoyments for those populations, all appearances are not against me. Let us only look back two hundred years and suppose that a trader had carried a rich cargo to the places where New York and Philadelphia now stand; could he have sold it? Let us suppose even, that he had succeeded in founding there an agricultural or manufacturing establishment; could he have there sold a single article of his produce? No, undoubtedly. He must have consumed them himself. Why do we now see the contrary? Why is the merchandize carried to, or made at Philadelphia or New York, sure to be sold at the current price? It seems to me evident that it is because the cultivators, the traders, and now even the manufacturers of New York, Philadelphia, and the adjacent provinces, create, or send there, some productions, by means of which they purchase what is brought to them from other quarters.
We produce in order to support our own demand for goods and services. We can’t produce just anything. We must be focused on producing things our fellow citizens want. This happens naturally in an unhampered market economy. If we consume without producing, we will eventually burn through all our capital and have no ability to demand anything further in the future. Spending alone is never the solution. The key is prior production.
So much for the Rt Hon. Jeremy Hunt’s plan to boost wealth by stealing and spending.
Chimera 2: prosperity through printing and spending
A more senior political master, the Chancellor, acquiesces to his Governor of the Bank of England: they will make more money units, freshly minted digital ones, specifically to create a Keynesian stimulus! The letter from the Governor to the Chancellor laying this proposition out concludes
the Committee judged that it was necessary to inject further monetary stimulus into the economy.
I have spent 22 years in devotion to satisfying consumer demands, and thus creating wealth. It is done as follows:
- As an entrepreneur you look for the most urgent needs of consumers.
- You work out how to fulfill those needs.
- Painfully, at the beginning of your enterprise, sometimes to pay more to your staff, you go without wages yourself and refrain from consumption — in short you save.
- Thus you deploy your savings or borrow the savings of others to take command over the various factors of production — land, labour and capital — and mix them into better and more capital-intensive combinations to provide the goods and services that the customers want.
- More capital deployed in the right intensity creates more productivity, allowing cheaper goods and services.
- This takes place over time.
More money units may create the illusion of wealth, leading to temporary euphoria, but when reality bites, you rapidly go back to square one, perhaps having made some unwise decisions along the way.
We are currently experiencing a money deflation, which the authorities are attempting to counteract by putting more money units in circulation. All stops have been pulled to prevent prices from falling into line with what consumers want. The money printers are obsessed with aggregate spending, when they should be concerned about profits.
If you had a company with £1m of capital invested in the capital structure, with revenues of £10m p.a. and profits of £250k and by dumping low-margin, loss-making work, you could move to a £1m capital intensive enterprise with £8m revenues and £500k of profit, would this not be better? The capital deployed would now be generating twice as much. I often give this analogy to people who have consumption spending fetishes, showing that it is not the top line, but the bottom line that we should all focus on.
Another analogy I give is of the salesman who reports to you that he has sold £1m of kit and does not mention at what net margin. How does he compare to the one who says he has sold £1m of kit at 10% net margin? It will almost be apodictic that the latter will have sold for more profit while the former, not concentrating on the bottom line and not even mentioning it, will have sold for less profit. Profit (in cash terms) is the only thing that matters at the end of the year.
Crudely put, the mass of Keynesians relate GDP, which measures largely the consumption side of the economy (ignoring the larger production side), as the revenue of goods and services sold for money in a particular period (usually a year). There are many problems with this, but for now note that a lowering of prices means a lowering of GDP. If prices fall thanks to productivity improvements we have the basis for a recovery, but GDP-obsessed planners will instead see disaster.
Attempts to prop up GDP by printing more money units will not increase real wealth, but they will cause further distortions to an economy that’s already out-of-sync with consumer preferences, and stoke new asset bubbles. The injections of cash will not address any of the causes of monetary deflation.
Over the last two decades, credit has been created to the extent that our money supply has tripled and asset prices have soared. These prices need to come down. When they come down, people will start to pick up bargains and start spending again. Companies will then invest to satisfy the renewed demand.
No politician will allow this painful adjustment to happen. They are in thrall to the circular flow of income fallacy.
What would Say say?
Say pointed out, as we have seen in the examples above, that it is production that allows you to trade for other goods and services. Production and consumption can’t be out of sync in an unhampered free market. Why do we have recessions like today’s, with shops and factories with too much to sell and too little demand? The only answer can only be that prices are too high. These goods and services, and indeed the factors of production that create these goods and services, are offered for too much money. Prices need to come down.
Prices were a subject of lively debate in the letters between Say and Malthus. Malthus, wedded to the erroneous Labour Theory of Value, alleged that if prices fell too low, wages would not be paid and the problem would get worse as labour would become idle, there would be less spending, and we would spiral into the abyss. This is what virtually all economists tell us today.
Here’s what Say had to say, in 1821:
Give me some just ideas on the price of things?
If you wish to form just ideas on this subject you must never confound the nominal price with the real price of things.
What do you call the nominal price of things?
The price we pay for a thing in money or in coin.
What do you call its real price?
The value we have given to obtain the money with which we purchase this thing.
A potter is in want of a loaf of bread, which sells for a shilling: he is obliged, in order to obtain it, to sell a vase which is worth a shilling. If the price of the loaf should rise to two shillings; and if the potter is obliged to sell two vases in order to obtain these two shillings, which he must pay for the loaf, the dearness of the bread is real. If the potter can obtain these two shillings by the sale of a single vase, the dearness of the bread is only nominal. He has in both cases exchanged only one vase against one loaf, whatever may have been the denomination of the intermediate value. It is the value of the money which is depreciated, that of the bread has remained the same.
Is it not a real dearness to a man whose income arises from lands which are let, or from a capital lent at interest, when the loaf has risen from one to two shillings?
No: that which is real is the depreciation which has taken place in the value of the merchandise in which his income is stipulated to be paid: that is, in the fall of the money. He who pays the income, by acquiring at less expense this merchandise, gains in this case what the other loses.
You have said that if, when I am obliged to give two shillings to buy a loaf, I am able to obtain these two shillings, on the same terms that I before obtained one, the loaf has not become dearer; but if to obtain two shillings, that is, the price of one loaf, I am obliged to give two vases instead of one, then the bread will have really become dearer?
No; not if the vases as well as the money have fallen to half their value.
How can I tell whether they have fallen to half their value or not?
They have fallen if they can be obtained for half the expenses of production: that is, if means have been found to create, at the same charge of production (which consists as we know of the workmanship, interest of capital and profit) two vases instead of one.
It is then the lowering the charges of production which causes the real fall in the price of products?
Just so. Then whatever may be the value with which a product is purchased, this product, which has fallen one half, is obtained for one half less expense of production.
If, by means of a knitting frame, I can make a pair of stockings for three shillings, instead of expending six shillings on them, he who grows wheat can obtain a pair of stockings for one half the quantity of wheat which he had before been accustomed to give for them. That is, if he was before obliged to sell thirty-six pounds of wheat in order to obtain a pair of stockings, he would now sell but eighteen. But the eighteen pounds have required on his part only one half the expenses of production which the thirty-six pounds would have required.
It is the same whatever is the production with which we are occupied. It may be said, that when an article really falls in price, not only those who produce it, but every body else, obtains it at the price of the reduced charge of production.
You have said besides that the riches of society is composed of the sum total of the values which it possesses: it appears to me to follow, that the fall of a product, stockings for example, by diminishing the sum of the values belonging to society, diminishes the mass of its riches.
The sum of the riches of society does not fall on that account. Two pairs of stockings are produced instead of one; and two pairs at three shillings are worth as much as one pair at six shillings. The income of society remains the same, for the maker gains as much on two pairs at three shillings, as he did on one pair at six shillings.
But, when the income remains the same, and the products fall, the society is really enriched. If the same fall takes place on all products at once, which is not absolutely impossible, society by obtaining all the objects of its consumption at half price, without having lost any part of its income, would really be twice as rich as before, and could buy twice as many things.
This does not generally happen, but it has happened to a great number of products, which have fallen from the price they were formerly at, some a tenth, some a fourth, a half, three-fourths, as silver, and even in a greater proportion as silks, and probably many other articles.
To what cause is that to be attributed?
To many causes: but principally to the progress of intelligence and industry. It is to their progress that we owe, both the discovery of countries in which there is a greater abundance of products, and also a means of transporting them less hazardous and more economical. To that progress also we are indebted for processes more simple and more expeditious, the use of machinery, and in general a better adaptation of the productive faculties of nature.
Are there any products which have really become dearer?
There are some, but very few, and only those the demand for which has increased in consequence of the progress of civilization, without the means of production having increased in the same proportion. Such as butchers’ meat and poultry, and almost all the useful animals which are raised at less expense in less civilized countries.
Are there not variations in value which are not the consequence of the charges of production?
The errors, the fears or the passions of men, or unforeseen events, cause disorder and confusion in values which are merely relative: that is, when any merchandise rises or falls with respect to others, in consequence of circumstances foreign to its production. Late frosts increase the price of the last years wines, whatever may have been the charges of their production.
Does such a dearness increase the national wealth?
No: for in exchanging another product for one which has become dearer, one must give more to receive less: he who buys, loses on his merchandise, precisely as much as the seller gains on his goods.
When the wine doubles its price, he, who, to purchase a piece of wine is obliged to sell six bushels of wheat instead of three, which should have purchased a piece of wine is poorer by all that the wine merchant is richer.
Thus these kinds of variation, which sometimes overturn private fortunes, do not affect the general riches
The key thing to note is that a rise in productivity means the same goods are produced at a lower cost, and profits go up, allowing more demand to be expressed in the economy. Productivity rises can be facilitated by allowing taxpayers to retain more of their wealth. Adding more money units simply creates asset bubbles.
Over the next few days I will post copies of some of the best refutations of Keynes’s supposed refutation of Say’s Law. The wisdom of the older economists is in short supply, and we will do our bit to promote that wisdom.
A better way of writing “if we spend money, we will end up getting wealthier” is as “if the state spends money, we will end up getting wealthier”. Leaving it as just “we” could be confused with private individuals’ spending money. In fact, if people make free decisions to spend, they could well contribute to greater overall growth. It’s when “we” have our money taken and spent by others that the problems start. The UK government is a Labour one, despite appearances to the contrary and there’s apparently no party articulating the better alternative to our present suicidal economic course.
I believe that Keynesians view consumption as critical to economic growth. Therefore, the “we” can be either individuals or the Gov’t. Thus the view is that if individuals are not spending enough (and are saving too much), the Gov’t must step in and provide the necessary spending. In otherwords, if you won’t spend, the Gov’t will take your money and spend it for you.
“Borrow and spend” is the Keynesians mantra for both individuals and the Gov’t. Preferably the Gov’t of course.
A very good post.
The things the Classical economists knew will have to relearned – if there is to be any hope for the survival of our civilization.
Evening Toby,
“It is remarkable that an educated man like Hunt cannot see that if we extract £39bn in taxes from the private sector and give it to the Olympic development people to spend, we have just moved money that people would otherwise have spent on goods and services they actually want, and directed it instead to the government’s preferred expenditure? The net gain is zero, at best.”
In normal times when desired saving=desired investment, this view would be the right one. But we are in a situation where money is being hoarded in the banking system as excess reserves. Therefore desired saving is not equal to desired investment. Or another way of looking at it is that people want to save more but can’t, as interest rates can’t go any lower to allow investment to increase (assuming an inactive central bank). So it is difficult to argue that the government taking these excess reserves and spending them is not stimulative for the economy. The issue is much more nuanced than you suggest.
On your points about money printing: yes, your proposed solution on allowing prices to fall would work and allow the economy to clear, but would involve a long and painful deflation, unemployment, and much suffering. But your problem is, why on earth would you do this if there is an alternative solution which does not involve this suffering? This solution is simply to print sufficient money such that the real interest rate is sufficient to clear the economy, ie so that desired saving is equal to desired investment.
Even Hayek accepted that the rule for a central bank should be to keep the price level stable – which means that, in principle, he would have been in favour of QE to prevent deflation.
Robert Sadler,
Keynsian does not, as you claim, consist of the idea that “if you won’t spend, the Gov’t will take your money and spend it for you”.
It is blindingly obvious to the average ten year old that if government raises taxes by £X and spends £X, the overall effect is approximately zero. I’d don’t know why Toby even bothered attacking that idea in the first part of his article above.
Keynsianism consists of the idea that that given excess unemployment, government should BORROW and spend £X, or create £X ex-nihilo and spend it (and,or cut taxes). E.g. see Keynes’s letter to Roosevelt here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/33886843/Keynes-NYT-Dec-31-1933
See in particular 2nd half of 5th paragraph, passage starting “public authority must be called…..”.
Indeed, in this letter Keyens SPECIFICALLY SAYS THAT expanding tax by £X and government spending by the same amount WONT HAVE ANY EFFECT.
And before someone points out that the act of borrowing has a deflationary effect which might negate the stimulatory effect the increased spending, there is quite possibly SOME TRUTH IN THAT. However, when government borrows £X, it spends the £X back into the private sector, PLUS IT GIVES £X of bonds to the private sector. So the private sector us up to the tune of £X. That on balance ought to have a stimulatory effect. Moreover, if the extra borrowing DOES raise interest rates, the central bank can always reduce them again.
Ralph,
The biggest problem with Keynesianism is that, as I point out above, there is a better solution than gov borrowing and spending. This is to print money to raise AD rather than rely on fiscal policy. Printing money is costless, but borrowing and spending is not – increasing debt and using real resources.
It could be argued that fiscal policy has no effect under an inflation targeting regime where the central bank is serious about its target. If fiscal intervention is carried out, this will raise AD and inflation. The central bank will respond by tightening money to reduce inflation, negating the fiscal intervention.
In my view, the central bank can still steer the nominal economy, even when interest rates are zero.
“Printing money is costless, but borrowing and spending is not – increasing debt and using real resources”
Costless for whom?
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Printing money is just a particularly surreptitious and dangerous way of transferring wealth (purchasing power) from one group to another.
The act of printing money does not cause new goods and resources to spring into existence. Instead, the new money competes with the old money for the same goods and resources, bidding up prices. The recipients of the new money benefit at the expense of all previous holders of money.
But I think we’ve been round this loop before.
With respect Ralph, I did say “borrow and spend”.
Regardless, Keynes’ work is so full of contradictions its impossible to take him seriously at any point. For example, Government borrowing now is merely a tax increase in the future and printing money is a tax increase now. Both of them impair the economy and both of them have the ultimate effect of the government spending your money against your will.
There is no valid role for either the government or the central bank in the economy.
Keynes is not really about “borrowing” money as a person would do in a rational world – i.e. a borrowing money from a SAVER.
What J.M. Keynes was about was CREATING money for the government to spend. Of course he then went along with the legal fiction that the money would be (technically) “borrowed” by the government – but the foundation of the matter (for Keynes as for any other “monetary crank”, i.e. “increase demand” types like Major D. and others) is the CREATION OF NEW MONEY.
Mr Mosley.
No Hayek was not (most of the time anyway) about maintaining a “stable price level” – even if Central Banks were any good at that (which they are not).
Hayek (most of the time) remembered enough economics (from Mises and so on) to know that real “inflation” is not “prices going up in the shops”, but the INCREASE IN THE MONEY SUPPLY.
For example, the vast credit money inflation of the late 1920s (the Ben Strong New York Federal Reserve inflation) was NOT matter of prices going up in the shops (they did not – the “price level”, price indexes are a rather silly concept anyway, remained “stable”) – yet this inflation (this increase in the money supply) created a classic boom-bust event.
No surprise to economists from Richard Cantillion (in the 1700s) to Ludwig Von Mises (“Theory of Money and Credit” 1912 – and so on) – but a big surprise to people like Fisher (of Yale).
Sadly it was the people who were wrong (like Fisher) who have had influence on “mainstream” economics – not people who were correct (such as Mises).
As can be seen in how few economists understood that the policy of Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve (increase the money supply – as long as the “price level” was not going up much) was terrible – utterly terrible.
See such works as Thomas Woods “Meltdown”.
By the way – even Milton Friedman (a Chicago School man – rather than an Austrian School man like Hayek) eventually understood that a “stable price level” was NOT what monetary policy should be about – and that the monetary base (at least) should NOT be increased, even if this means a modest reduction of prices over time.
What monetary policy is about is avoiding a phony credit-money “boom” which MUST end in a “bust”.
But the only way to avoid this credit-money boom is NOT to increase the money supply – in the desire to produce “cheap money”, “low interest rates” and all the other things that are the stock-in-trade of Central Banking.
Of course commercial banks can produce great problems on their own (without a Central Bank – see the boom-bust events in the United States BEFORE the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913), but the introduction of Central Banking makes these things WORSE.
It MAGNIFIES AND EXPANDS the worst features of banking (rather than reducing them).
Banks can do all sorts of smoke-and-mirrors tricks and shell games to loan out money that was never really saved (i.e. money that strictly speaking DOES NOT EXIST) – but the one thing such banks can not do is EXPAND THE MONETARY BASE.
That is what Central Banks can (and do) understake – and it is the reason they are such a bad idea.
Every time (for example) Alan Greenspan “saved the world” he was really SAVING THE CREDIT BUBBLE (by expanding the money supply), he was putting off the problem (as Central Bankers do), but he was also MAKING THE BASIC PROPLEM WORSE.
The bust would happen eventually (it has to)- so just pumping things up every time the bust is about to happen (as Central Bankers can – and often do) just makes the eventual bust vastly more terrible in the end.
Paul,
I’d be interested to know what you consider to be ‘the money supply’. What matters is broad money, ie bank deposits plus currency in simple terms. Broad money has actually been decreasing in the UK in recent times; ie money is being destroyed. So presumably you approve of the money policy of the bank of England?
Hayek I believe recognised later in life that the fed should not have allowed the money supply to drop in the 30s great depression.
See
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/290199/20120131/um4-money-supply.htm
Note that M4ex is not contracting:
http://www.kaleidic.org/data/#ma
Dan, I quite agree that the print option is better than borrow option. In fact I did a blog post here arguing that all government borrowing is pointless.
http://ralphanomics.blogspot.com/2012/01/government-borrowing-is-pointless.html
I more or less agree with your 1st Feb 20.12 comment, except that I don’t agree that getting the amount of money saved to equal the amount spent on investment is a good objective. That is first because there is no sharp dividing line between investment goods and consumption goods. E.g. is something designed to last one week an investment? Or how about one month, one year, two years? It’s impossible to draw a line here.
And even if you can define “investment” it would be perfectly possible to have a scenario where there was a serious lack of demand and high unemployment, yet the amount saved equalled the amount invested.
I agree that the core of the problem (in the US at least) is deleveraging or hoarding (i.e. “paradox of thrift” unemployment). Solution: the central bank / government needs to supply the private sector with whatever stock of money savings that induces the private sector to spend at a rate that brings full employment. Plus the central bank / government needs to run a deficit (or surplus) to match the private sector’s desire to save (or dissave) in order to keep aforementioned stock at the right level.
Mrg,
Printing new money will not “bid up prices” if there is excess unemployment and excess capacity in the economy. And in any case, are you suggesting that as the economy expands, the money supply should not expand pari passu?
In the middle ages the average peasant had enough money is his pocket to buy about one loaf of bread. Do you think it would make sense if the average person nowadays had that amount of money?
Ralph, I would go with the textbook definition of investment, ie that investment equals spending on capital goods. This means that saving always equals investment by definition. But this does not mean that desired saving is always equal to desired investment.
Inflation targeting however should always work to allow the market to clear. If investment falls due to a loss in confidence, or there is an attempt to save more, then interest rates will fall until desired saving is equal to desired investment. Where it gets a bit complicated is when interest rates hit zero – but here the real rate of interest is simply equal to the negative of the inflation rate.
I agree though that it is difficult to come up with a clear definition of investment spending.
Maybe you could come up with a scenario where desired investment and desired saving were equal, but there was a lack of demand. However I don’t think that is the case with the current recession due to the huge excess reserves held by the banks. There is a desire to save more, but this can’t happen due to central bank money policy.
Dan, I think there is much confusion in the investment and savings area – and not just amongst those contributing to this blog. I support Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), and I think some of the leading lights in the MMT movement have got in a muddle here. Basically a clear distinction is not being made between saving in the sense of accumulating money, and saving in the sense of investing in capital goods. The two are entirely separate.
To illustrate, there has been a high rate of saving by the private sector over the last two years in the “accumulating money” sense – in that the US and UK governments have created unprecedented amounts of new money and fed it into the private sector. But that has absolutely nothing to do with how much capital investment is taking place. Indeed one could perfectly well have a high rate of “money saving” combined with zero capital investment, or the other way round.
I’ll do a post on my blog on this subject in the next week which might clarify the issue – or might not!
Ralph, yes you are certainly right that there is much confusion in this area, even many of the academics can’t seem to agree! As I said, my definition of saving is building capital goods. Money hoarding is a completely separate issue as you point out. I’ll be interested to read your blog post on the subject.
Dan – I have never denied that banks (via various shell games and smoke and mirrors tricks) can increase the amount of credit they deal in beyond real savings.
J.P. Morgan used to have sleepless nights over this sort of game – and he (and other bankers of his time) were only operating a scam of some two to three Dollars of credit for every Dollar of real savings. With the advent of the Federal Reserve this went to up “broad money” (bank credit) being some 12 times the size of the monetary base by 1929 (with well known consequences).
HOWEVER, without Central Banks banks can only play credit bubble games to a certain extent – the “boom” of credit money is (as you know) followed by the inevitable “bust”.
What Central Banking does is allow (via both expanding the monetary base itself and by producing a false sense of “confidence” in the credit bubble scam of finance) the credit bubble to expand to a vastly greater size than it otherwise would. And thus for the eventual (and inevitable) bust to be vastly bigger also. Nor is it a matter of everything just going back to what it was to start with – as even Richard Cantillion knew (way back in the 1700s) the damage that a credit bubble does is very real – and has effects long after the boom-bust event itself.
Every time the credit bubble of the 1990s and 2000s looked like it was going to burst the Federal Reserve (under Alan Greenspan) moved in to “save the financial system” (i.e. the save the credit bubble scam) by increasing the money supply – thus, yes, prolonging the “boom” but also making the eventual (and inevitable) bust worse and worse.
Sadly the present Federal Reserve Chairman B.B. (if only that was Bilbo Baggins) has followed the same policy – but also taken it to a demented exterme.
As has the Bank of England (and so on) – as, like yourself, they are terrified of a “decline in broad money”, i.e. the inevitable collapse of the credit money bubble. The European Central Bank has joined them in this orgy of sweetheart loans and other bailouts – by (for example) givin the banks a 485 billion Euro Christmas present just a few weeks ago (“it was not a present it was a loan” – a loan of money the ECB created from NOTHING, and a “loan” on rather special terms).
At the latest in 2013 you will see the end game of this absurd “financial system”.