The fractional reserve system and its associated fiat currencies will always drive "banking" as a service in the same direction: loans that become increasingly predatory.
The root problem isn't the banks, per se, rather the problem is the underlying system that modern banks are incentivized by.
Remove usury (loans at a profit) and base the national currency on something (anything is better than nothing, but the Socialists in Germany used production, and before the 1970s the US used gold) and I think you'd see that banks as a business would radically change.
They wouldn't because you literally changed nothing. The USD is on a failed gold standard. We are still living the aftermath of a failed gold standard. Also, in theory a gold standard does absolutely nothing. All the theoretical benefits you think that come from a gold standard can be implemented today. The only difference is that a gold standard collapses when you go out of its modus operandi.
The obvious problem is the concept that money from this period should be valid in any future period with no decay or costs associated with holding the money. This leads to a compression of the economy along the time dimension. It manipulates time preferences because money can be transported into the future at no cost which artificially subsidises low time preferences. The market no longer properly integrates the time preferences of all participants and this then leads to people who met their needs to assert their low time preference over people with unmet needs who by mere necessity, and not because of psychological or personal failure as many claim, have a higher time preference. A recession can be viewed as shifting production into the future even as people have unmet needs in the present.
The only known solution is to get rid of cash or to introduce some sort of time bound money like demurrage currencies. A demurrage currency cannot be carried into the future at no cost. This binds the currency to a specific time period which in turn means that people with excess money can no longer impose their patience onto people who are impatient by circumstance.
The gold standard was removed in the 1970s. There has been no value behind the dollar since then. During the same time, the US Gov't actually seized citizen's gold.
> The obvious problem is the concept that money from this period should be valid in any future period with no decay or costs associated with holding the money.
This statement is confusing to me. Are you saying that there is not time-cost to the holder of cash if that cash is backed by gold? That is, if I have 100USD (gold backed) there is no downside to holding that cash as opposed to spending it?
> The only known solution is to get rid of cash or to introduce some sort of time bound money like demurrage currencies.
You may like the idea of CBDCs, then. With a centrally controlled digital currency it would be possible to put expiration dates on cash in order to force people to spend their money. Hyper-inflation has the same affect, though. If you look at the Argentine economy and how people spend money with 40-200% inflation year-over-year, you'll see that no one holds onto their cash. They all spend their cash in a very short period of time. People convert the currency that cannot store value into things that can; things like goods, US dollars, crypto currencies, etc.
> Fractional reserve banking is the idea that banks take their reserves and lend them into some fraction based on the quantity of reserves they hold. This idea has been largely debunked since the financial crisis. In reality, banks do not lend their reserves, except to one another inside of the reserve system (which is a closed system, ie, reserves don’t even leave the system). They don’t even lend based on the quantity of reserves they hold.
The root problem isn't the banks, per se, rather the problem is the underlying system that modern banks are incentivized by.
Remove usury (loans at a profit) and base the national currency on something (anything is better than nothing, but the Socialists in Germany used production, and before the 1970s the US used gold) and I think you'd see that banks as a business would radically change.