E4 - Money and Interest RatesReturn

Electronization of banking services is a strong reason for relative growth of cashless payments. The importance of cash, i.e., banknotes and coins, for realizing transactions should decrease. An analysis for the Czech Republic in the period 2003-2015 confirms this. Demand of nonbank entities for cash is associated mainly with liquidity, banks' credibility and technological sophistication. Illegal transactions also form part of the demand. Zero return on cash counteracts demand, but it has little meaning with the decline in interest rates on bank deposits. The total stock of cash in the analyzed period rises, but its relative importance declines. Demand deposits are also liquid assets of households and enterprises. Cash compared with demand deposits clearly confirms the declining importance. Its share was the highest in 2004, at 30%. It fell to less than 18% in 2015. We found a similar tendency in the comparison of cash with other variables. Barring unforeseen circumstances such as complete collapse of computer networks or severe banking crisis, the author assumes that the relative importance of cash must decline in the long term. Some theoretical aspects of cash and cashless money are also discussed.

Financial fragility and instability of banking sectors has received increased academic attention due to recent financial crises around the world. The objective of the article is to extend and adapt a previously created financial fragility model of the Czech financial sector in order to reflect its specific conditions. It introduces the concept of minimum required reserves and uses consistent sources of data collected from annual reports of Czech banks in 2013. Besides the prediction of default of households, the model also allows a prediction of key macroeconomic variables such as the inflation and unemployment rates. However, some of the issues of this class of models - in particular, the impossibility to measure some of its exogenous parameters - remain unresolved and present a challenge for the future development of the model.

The latest financial crisis, among other consequences, has led to significant reductions in bank lending. Because cashless bank loans granted to non-bank clients are the dominant way of issue of money into the economy, reducing of them influenced also deflationary pressures. Central banks have tried to respond by expansionary monetary policy in the form of purchases of debt securities from banks and interest rate cuts. However, without any significant effect. Banks did not use a higher quantity of money in the banking system to order to increase granting of loans into the economy. We could observe the similar problems in the Czech Republic. Analysis of data between late 2008 - mid-2014 reliably confirms the weak impact of the Czech National Bank on the development of credit and the quantity of money in the economy. We analyzed data on currency, bank reserves, the monetary base, the monetary aggregates, deposits and loans. Separate analysis concerned the money multipliers and the credit multiplier. The banking system in the Czech Republic is also very specific in the existence of large excess bank reserves. The policy of lowering interest rates by the central bank had not the desired effect, so the only possibility was depreciation of the domestic currency. Another enormous increase in bank reserves as a direct result of unsterilized foreign exchange intervention again did not lead to a significant growth in loans and the quantity of money in the economy. Pressures against deflation can therefore be expected only from the reaction of households and firms to weaker domestic currency.