Oblique---I'll second that!--Pynchon. Gold and the Gold Standard and so forth.

[David Morris]

Money is paper, not nothing. It is a form of contract.

On Saturday, December 20, 2014, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Abstract
>
> This paper presents the first empirical evidence in the history of
> banking on the question of whether banks can create money out of
> nothing. The banking crisis has revived interest in this issue, but it
> had remained unsettled. Three hypotheses are recognised in the
> literature. According to the financial intermediation theory of
> banking, banks are merely intermediaries like other non-bank financial
> institutions, collecting deposits that are then lent out. According to
> the fractional reserve theory of banking, individual banks are mere
> financial intermediaries that cannot create money, but collectively
> they end up creating money through systemic interaction. A third
> theory maintains that each individual bank has the power to create
> money 'out of nothing' and does so when it extends credit (the credit
> creation theory of banking). The question which of the theories is
> correct has far-reaching implications for research and policy.
> Surprisingly, despite the longstanding controversy, until now no
> empirical study has tested the theories. This is the contribution of
> the present paper. An empirical test is conducted, whereby money is
> borrowed from a cooperating bank, while its internal records are being
> monitored, to establish whether in the process of making the loan
> available to the borrower, the bank transfers these funds from other
> accounts within or outside the bank, or whether they are newly
> created. This study establishes for the first time empirically that
> banks individually create money out of nothing. The money supply is
> created as 'fairy dust' produced by the banks individually, "out of
> thin air".
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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