> Banks loan without collateral all the time, such as via credit cards or unsecured lines of credit.
Yes, I was avoiding that can of worms. Banks do unsecured lending, there is still an asset entry to offset it so that the books remain positive. Armies of regulators and accountants and volumes of laws in effect here.
But the salient point: A fractional reserve business consciously makes loans with an expectation of being paid back. To my knowledge, Gox was not trying run a fractional reserve business, and the term is being misapplied.
> This is why fractional reserve banking increases the money supply.
It increases a money supply, not the money supply. It does not increase M0 (and there was a time that banks were allowed to do just that.)
Note that in a secured loan, the security is rarely for the full amount of the loan (mortgages being a notable exception). Usually it covers only a fraction of it, but it's there to increase the borrower's "skin in the game". Rules also differ on whether or not the security itself is acceptable as discharging a loan's obligations (e.g., in Spanish real estate lending, if the property itself isn't sufficiently highly valued to pay off the loan balance, the borrower _remains_ on the hook for the balance, this is usually not the case in the US, where most mortgages are non-recourse loans.). See also "deficiency judgement".
In both secured and unsecured loans, the debt itself is the security, with a portion of the interest being attributable to the risk (default) component of the loan.
As for money supply, bank reserves are included in M2 which is used for inflation calculations, so I'd argue that yes, fractional reserve lending does increase money supply, as commonly used.
Yes, I was avoiding that can of worms. Banks do unsecured lending, there is still an asset entry to offset it so that the books remain positive. Armies of regulators and accountants and volumes of laws in effect here.
But the salient point: A fractional reserve business consciously makes loans with an expectation of being paid back. To my knowledge, Gox was not trying run a fractional reserve business, and the term is being misapplied.
> This is why fractional reserve banking increases the money supply.
It increases a money supply, not the money supply. It does not increase M0 (and there was a time that banks were allowed to do just that.)