Politicians know nothing about banking

I came across a link to the House of Commons Treasury Committee report on the banking crisis in the UK, entitled "Banking Crisis: dealing with the failure of the UK banks" here. I thought this would be a good time to check out just how well understood the problems of fractional reserve banking and fiat money are amongst politicians. To test this I did a little search to find out how many occurrences of certain key phrases there were in the 129 page document. And here are the results:

• "Fractional reserve" - NIL
• "Money multiplier" - NIL
• "money supply" - NIL
• "M3" - NIL
• "Reserve requirements" - NIL
• "Fiat currency" - NIL
• "Gold standard" - NIL
• "High powered money" - NIL
• "Monetary base" - NIL
  

No wonder the banks have been able to pull the wool over the eyes of politicians for so long.