Taxpayer backed deposit insurance is a nonsense.

If bank deposits are not insured, as was the case in several countries prior to WWII, then so called deposits are not actually deposits: that’s “deposit” in the sense of “a totally secure holding of $X”. Those so called deposits are more akin to shares or bonds, i.e. so called depositors are not guaranteed to get their money back.

So that system, it can be argued, amounts to full reserve banking: a system where bank loans are funded by equity, not deposits.

Alternatively, if deposits are insured by taxpayer backed deposit insurance, that amounts to a subsidy of banks and depositors. Reason is that taxpayer backed insurance is artificially cheap or “good value for money” because everyone knows the state has limitless powers to grab money off taxpayers to rescue depositors should there be a series of large bank failures.

That’s similar to the “too big to fail” phenomenon: that is, if everyone knows taxpayers will come to the rescue of a large bank when it gets into trouble, that knowledge in itself means the relevant bank can borrow at an artificially low rate of interest, even if the bank never actually gets into trouble and taxpayers never actually need come to the rescue of said bank.

But subsidies for banks or indeed any other type of corporation are not justified, unless it can be shown there are overwhelming social considerations involved.

Ergo taxpayer backed deposit insurance for fractional reserve banks is not justified. Accounts at banks should be split into two basic types: first, accounts where deposited money is not loaned on. Those accounts are totally safe because they are INHERENTLY totally safe and do not need any significant amount of insurance.

The second type of account is where deposited money IS LOANED ON, but it’s made abundantly clear to depositors that they may not get all their money back.

And apart from the latter arrangement making sense logically, an additional bonus is that it’s plain impossible for banks to fail: for example if it turns out that the loans made by a bank are worth only half of their book value, the bank does not go bust. All that happens is that depositors will get only around half their money back if they want to cash in their deposits immediately. Alternatively they can hold on in the hopes that things improve.

And as for the idea that funding loans via equity will be much more expensive than funding them via deposits, that’s rather contradicted by the fact that at the time of writing the return on equity in general is (bizarrely) less than the return on bonds, and bonds are of course nothing more than long term deposits.

But even if funding via equity does turn out to be more expensive, the important point is that that system is subsidy free. Ergo it approximates a genuine free market better than funding via deposits. Ergo GDP ought to be higher under that subsidy free system.