[발췌: Steve Keen's] Economists Ignore One of Capitalism's Biggest Problems. Banks Create Money out of Nothing.

지은이: Steve Keen
출처: Evonomics, Apr 2016
원출처: "Note To Joe Stiglitz: Banks Originate, Not Intermediate, And That's Why Aggregate Demand Is Stuffed," Forbes, Jan 2016


※ 발췌:

According to the mainstream, the rate of growth of debt is generally irrelevant to macroeconomics, because lending simply redistributes spending power from savers to investors—it doesn’t create spending power in its own right. What matters is that socially useful projects are funded which then fuel economic growth. How much private debt changes every year is simply a side-effect of getting money from savers who don’t spend, to investors who do. And huge changes can occur in the level of private debt without any impact on the rate of economic growth.

For decades now, a handful of rebel economists have been disputing this—including me of course, but going back to Irving Fisher and even earlier, and including modern non-mainstream economists like Stephanie Kelton (who now advises Bernie Sanders), and University of Southampton Professor Richard Werner. Oh, and a guy named Hyman Minsky too, whom the mainstream ignored until the 2008 crisis. But the mainstream ignored us before the crisis, and continues to ignore us after it, because their “banks as intermediaries” model tells them that we are just spouting nonsense.

We’re not, of course: the ordinary public tends to get that, and even The Bank of England has come out and said that it’s the mainstream that is spouting nonsense, not the rebels. But the mainstream rejects our analysis out of hand,because their model tells them that it’s OK to do so.