One problem we have at MacroBusiness is that all our bloggers have day jobs. We would love to be doing this full-time but obviously we have to pay for our existence and also like to spend time with our families. There are a number of topics that I would love to concentrate on full time and write about at length, but I simply don’t have the time. I am however passionate about sharing knowledge and I am a big believer in economic democracy.
I see the general public’s lack of knowledge of the economy as a bit of a concern because in order to make rational decisions about economic policy you need to at least have a basic understanding of how the economy actually functions. It would however be fairly obvious to readers of MacroBusiness that even the so-called “experts” struggle with that. But we mustn’t be disheartened.
On my previous blog I used to have a weekend mailbag where I answered questions from readers. I found that process quite valuable and rewarding, and I hope my readers did to.
As I stated above we are all a bit time poor at MacroBusiness, I am however passionate about sharing knowledge so in order to get some more economic awareness out there I thought I would try a bit of an experiment (which may or may not work). I am going to (re-)start a MacroBusiness mailbag weekly post, but instead of leaving it up to only the MacroBusiness bloggers to provide the answers I will throw the question open to all MacroBusiness readers. (Obviously the bloggers will also provide comment if they can)
If you want to send in a question then please use the contact page or send any of the individual bloggers a message. Hopefully this will stir a bit of shared learnings about all things economic. So let’s see how we go.
The first question from the mailbag comes from Christine. If you think you can provide an answer , link and/or example for her please leave a comment.
Hi,
I was just wondering something about Australian banks. Recently I have seen articles in the newspaper stating that they are lowering their exposure to foreign markets by using more local deposits to fund their loans. I don’t really understand how this works. I have been told that banks don’t need deposits to give out loans so why are they doing this? and how is a “foreign borrowing” equivalent to a deposit anyway ? isn’t one a debt and the other money ?