M
morganist
You are not differentiating in what is classed as an excess reserve it is only a temporary surplus of funds that banks hold before lending out. In the United Kingdom it is necessary and helps banks to make profits and set the lending price they need. It is this mechanism in the United Kingdom that makes the bank competitive with other banks and makes some banks more successful than others.
A banks success in the United Kingdom may be more down to how it handles its ability to set lending prices competitively through this excess fund process, even though it may only hold on to these excess funds for a few days or even a few hours. I have figured out what you are missing in your understanding of the banking system, it is this ability to make a bank competitive with other banks by offering cheaper loans.
It is down to how they manage or handle the funds they borrow to lend out to customers and how this enables them to offer a more competitive price to other banks. You have taken price competition and the market for debt out of the picture. You are not taking into consideration what makes customers want to borrow from a bank, how the bank attracts it market share of lending and what it has to do to get that custom.
Does the reserve adjustment facility you explain enable American banks to compete with each other. The system in the United Kingdom does through providing opportunities to take advantage of low debt borrowing offers and then passing them on to the customer. Part of a banks success is how well they manage this function. Funding from borrowing at low prices enables this competition and having the money at a good price in advance helps it.
Further to my above commments. There is a reason why banks hold excess reserves and I know Piezoe thinks it something they should not do, but there is a reason why they do it. The first is they can't always shift the cheap debt they have borrowed straight away, they have to get custom to pass on the debt they have this involves advertising and competitive prices. It can take a while to shift the low priced borrowed funds they have in their excess reserves but they will hold it because they could borrow it cheaply and then it is a case of lending it out.
The second reason is there is a massive trade in the loanable fund market where banks can make money from trading the cheap loans they have between each other to then pass on to customers. Just the trading process with other banks of the excess funds the intial bank borrowed is a form of business. Rather than the customer being someone who borrows money from a bank it is another bank who borrows the funds at a higher price than the initial bank has to pay. Banks can make money from this turnover of buying low and selling high.
There is a whole market and business operation that is made possible by holding excess reserves. However the excess reserves are not a set figure held for a long time but a fast turnover of many trades made daily or hourly to make money 'playing' the loanable fund market. This is a business operation and kind of like a bank holding stocks or shares, you have to own them to be able to sell them at a profit. This whole mechanism makes the buying and selling of cheap debt, price setting and bank competiveness possible.
