LARS P. SYLL

How money is created

Everything we know is not just wrong – it’s backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes.

There’s really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it. They will never get caught short, for the simple reason that borrowers do not, generally speaking, take the cash and put it under their mattresses; ultimately, any money a bank loans out will just end up back in some bank again. So for the banking system as a whole, every loan just becomes another deposit. What’s more, insofar as banks do need to acquire funds from the central bank, they can borrow as much as they like; all the latter really does is set the rate of interest, the cost of money, not its quantity. Since the beginning of the recession, the US and British central banks have reduced that cost to almost nothing. In fact, with “quantitative easing” they’ve been effectively pumping as much money as they can into the banks, without producing any inflationary effects.

What this means is that the real limit on the amount of money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow. Government spending is the main driver in all this … So there’s no question of public spending “crowding out” private investment. It’s exactly the opposite.

David Graeber

Sounds odd, doesn’t it?

This guy must sure be one of those strange and dangerous heterodox cranks?

Well, maybe you should reconsider …

The reality of how money is created today differs from the description found in some economics textbooks:
• Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits.
• In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money ‘multiplied up’ into more loans and deposits …
Most of the money in circulation is created, not by the printing presses of the Bank of England, but by the commercial banks themselves: banks create money whenever they lend to someone in the economy or buy an asset from consumers. And in contrast to descriptions found in some textbooks, the Bank of England does not directly control the quantity of either base or broad money. The Bank of England is nevertheless still able to influence the amount of money in the economy. It does so in normal times by setting monetary policy — through the interest rate that it pays on reserves held by commercial banks with the Bank of England. More recently, though, with Bank Rate constrained by the effective lower bound, the Bank of England’s asset purchase programme has sought to raise the quantity of broad money in circulation. This in turn affects the prices and quantities of a range of assets in the economy, including money.

Michael McLeay, Amar Radia and Ryland Thomas
Bank of England’s Monetary Analysis Directorate

How money is created

Everything we know is not just wrong – it’s backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes.

There’s really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it … For the banking system as a whole, every loan just becomes another deposit. What’s more, insofar as banks do need to acquire funds from the central bank, they can borrow as much as they like; all the latter really does is set the rate of interest, the cost of money, not its quantity …

The real limit on the amount of money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow.

David Graeber

Sounds odd, doesn’t it?

This guy must surely be one of those strange and dangerous heterodox MMT cranks?

Well, maybe you should reconsider …

The reality of how money is created today differs from the description found in some economics textbooks:
• Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits.
• In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money ‘multiplied up’ into more loans and deposits …
Most of the money in circulation is created, not by the printing presses of the Bank of England, but by the commercial banks themselves: banks create money whenever they lend to someone in the economy or buy an asset from consumers. And in contrast to descriptions found in some textbooks, the Bank of England does not directly control the quantity of either base or broad money.

Bank of England’s Monetary Analysis Directorate

How money is created

Everything we know is not just wrong – it’s backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes.

There’s really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it … For the banking system as a whole, every loan just becomes another deposit. What’s more, insofar as banks do need to acquire funds from the central bank, they can borrow as much as they like; all the latter really does is set the rate of interest, the cost of money, not its quantity …

The real limit on the amount of money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow.

David Graeber

Sounds odd, doesn’t it?

This guy must sure be one of those strange and dangerous heterodox cranks?

Well, maybe you should reconsider …

The reality of how money is created today differs from the description found in some economics textbooks:
• Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits.
• In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money ‘multiplied up’ into more loans and deposits …
Most of the money in circulation is created, not by the printing presses of the Bank of England, but by the commercial banks themselves: banks create money whenever they lend to someone in the economy or buy an asset from consumers. And in contrast to descriptions found in some textbooks, the Bank of England does not directly control the quantity of either base or broad money.

Bank of England’s Monetary Analysis Directorate

The reality of how money is created

Everything we know is not just wrong – it’s backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes.

There’s really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it. They will never get caught short, for the simple reason that borrowers do not, generally speaking, take the cash and put it under their mattresses; ultimately, any money a bank loans out will just end up back in some bank again. So for the banking system as a whole, every loan just becomes another deposit. What’s more, insofar as banks do need to acquire funds from the central bank, they can borrow as much as they like; all the latter really does is set the rate of interest, the cost of money, not its quantity. Since the beginning of the recession, the US and British central banks have reduced that cost to almost nothing. In fact, with “quantitative easing” they’ve been effectively pumping as much money as they can into the banks, without producing any inflationary effects.

What this means is that the real limit on the amount of money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow. Government spending is the main driver in all this … So there’s no question of public spending “crowding out” private investment. It’s exactly the opposite.

David Graeber

Sounds odd, doesn’t it?

This guy must sure be one of those strange and dangerous heterodox cranks?

Well, maybe you should reconsider …

The reality of how money is created today differs from the description found in some economics textbooks:
• Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits.
• In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money ‘multiplied up’ into more loans and deposits …
Most of the money in circulation is created, not by the printing presses of the Bank of England, but by the commercial banks themselves: banks create money whenever they lend to someone in the economy or buy an asset from consumers. And in contrast to descriptions found in some textbooks, the Bank of England does not directly control the quantity of either base or broad money. The Bank of England is nevertheless still able to influence the amount of money in the economy. It does so in normal times by setting monetary policy — through the interest rate that it pays on reserves held by commercial banks with the Bank of England. More recently, though, with Bank Rate constrained by the effective lower bound, the Bank of England’s asset purchase programme has sought to raise the quantity of broad money in circulation. This in turn affects the prices and quantities of a range of assets in the economy, including money.

Michael McLeay, Amar Radia and Ryland Thomas
Bank of England’s Monetary Analysis Directorate

The money multiplier — neat, plausible, and utterly wrong

The mainstream textbook concept of money multiplier assumes that banks automatically expand the credit money supply to a multiple of their aggregate reserves.  If the required currency-deposit reserve ratio is 5%, the money supply should be about twenty times larger than the aggregate reserves of banks.  In this way, the money multiplier concept assumes that the central bank controls the money supply by setting the required reserve ratio.

In his Macroeconomics — just to take an example — Greg Mankiw writes:

We can now see that the money supply is proportional to the monetary base. The factor of proportionality … is called the money multiplier … Each dollar of the monetary base produces m dollars of money. Because the monetary base has a multiplied effect on the money supply, the monetary base is called high-powered money.

The money multiplier concept is – as can be seen from the quote above – nothing but one big fallacy. This is not the way credit is created in a monetary economy. It’s nothing but a monetary myth that the monetary base can play such a decisive role in a modern credit-run economy with fiat money.

In the real world banks first extend credits and then look for reserves. So the money multiplier basically also gets the causation wrong. At a deep fundamental level, the supply of money is endogenous.

One may rightly wonder why on earth this pet mainstream fairy tale is still in the textbooks and taught to economics undergraduates. Giving the impression that banks exist simply to passively transfer savings into investment, it is such a gross misrepresentation of what goes on in the real world, that there is only one place for it …

The money multiplier – neat, plausible, and utterly wrong

The mainstream textbook concept of money multiplier assumes that banks automatically expand the credit money supply to a multiple of their aggregate reserves.  If the required currency-deposit reserve ratio is 5%, the money supply should be about twenty times larger than the aggregate reserves of banks.  In this way, the money multiplier concept assumes that the central bank controls the money supply by setting the required reserve ratio.

In his Macroeconomics — just to take an example — Greg Mankiw writes:

We can now see that the money supply is proportional to the monetary base. The factor of proportionality … is called the money multiplier … Each dollar of the monetary base produces m dollars of money. Because the monetary base has a multiplied effect on the money supply, the monetary base is called high-powered money.

The money multiplier concept is — as can be seen from the quote above — nothing but one big fallacy. This is not the way credit is created in a monetary economy. It’s nothing but a monetary myth that the monetary base can play such a decisive role in a modern credit-run economy with fiat money.

In the real world, banks first extend credits and then look for reserves. So the money multiplier basically also gets the causation wrong. At a deep fundamental level, the supply of money is endogenous.

One may rightly wonder why on earth this pet mainstream fairy tale is still in the textbooks and taught to economics undergraduates. Giving the impression that banks exist simply to passively transfer savings into investment, it is such a gross misrepresentation of what goes on in the real world, that there is only one place for it — and that is in the garbage can!

Time to rewrite textbook chapters on money

This article has discussed how money is created in the modern economy. Most of the money in circulation is created, not by the printing presses of the Bank of England, but by the commercial banks themselves: banks create money whenever they lend to someone in the economy or buy an asset from consumers.And in contrast to descriptions found in some textbooks, the Bank of England does not directly control the quantity of either base or broad money. The Bank of England is nevertheless still able to influence the amount of money in the economy. It does so in normal times by setting monetary policy — through the interest rate that it pays on reserves held by commercial banks with the Bank of England. More recently, though, with Bank Rate constrained by the effective lower bound, the Bank of England’s asset purchase programme has sought to raise the quantity of broad money in circulation. This in turn affects the prices and quantities of a range of assets in the economy, including money.

M. McLeay et al. / Bank of England’s Monetary Analysis Directorate

The weird absence of money and finance in economic theory

Consider the problem of money. Money is of central importance to any modern capitalist market economy. Yet it is mainly sociologists, philosophers and dissenters that have maintained an interest in what money “is” with a view to continued critique and development … One might think this is because economics has already provided an agreed clear concept of money. But this is not the case. Contemporary economics defines money in terms of function (unit of account, store of value, medium of exchange), but puts aside both the actual history of money (after an origin story) and the conceptual problem of money, both of which likely affect the functionality of money in the broader sense of its role and consequence in real systems …

What appears weird to those outside of the mainstream is that in economic theory in general money is typically absent. It is usually assumed that in a properly functioning market system prices express the value of output such that all prices effectively become representative of ratios between goods and services (and inputs), and this ultimately means a market system operates as though it were barter. Money simply becomes the convenient symbol (in its medium of exchange guise) that expresses these ratios. As such, it has no independent significance, and one ought to look through money to the operation of “real” economic factors, and can in effect ignore money as a contributory, contextualising or significant component in a system …

The role of money in real systems has generally been peripheralised because of an arbitrary limitation created by the assumption that money is separate from and then circumspectly significant to “real” factors. This statement may seem odd to a non-economist, since we live in a world where monetary policy is high profile, and a great deal of attention is paid to central bank policy (inflation targeting for price stability), and to the existence and activity of banks.

Jamie Morgan / RWER

Yes indeed — money doesn’t matter in mainstream macroeconomic models. That’s true. According to the ‘classical dichotomy,’ real variables — output and employment — are independent of monetary variables, and so enables mainstream economics to depict the economy as basically a barter system.

But in the real world in which we happen to live, money certainly does matter. Money is not neutral and money matters in both the short run and the long run:

The theory which I desiderate would deal … with an economy in which money plays a part of its own and affects motives and decisions, and is, in short, one of the operative factors in the situation, so that the course of events cannot be predicted in either the long period or in the short, without a knowledge of the behaviour of money between the first state and the last. And it is this which we ought to mean when we speak of a monetary economy.

J. M. Keynes A monetary theory of production (1933)

What is also ‘forgotten’ in mainstream economic theory, is the insight that finance — in all its different shapes — has its own dimension, and if taken seriously, its effect on an analysis must modify the whole theoretical system and not just be added as an unsystematic appendage. Finance is fundamental to our understanding of modern economies​ and acting like the baker’s apprentice who, having forgotten to add yeast to the dough, throws it into the oven afterwards, simply isn’t enough.

All real economic activities nowadays depend on a functioning financial machinery. But institutional arrangements, states of confidence, fundamental uncertainties, asymmetric expectations, the banking system, financial intermediation, loan granting processes, default risks, liquidity constraints, aggregate debt, cash flow fluctuations, etc., etc. — things that play decisive roles in channelling money/savings/credit — are more or less left in the dark in modern mainstream formalizations.

Time to rewrite textbooks on money creation

This article has discussed how money is created in the modern economy. Most of the money in circulation is created, not by the printing presses of the Bank of England, but by the commercial banks themselves: banks create money whenever they lend to someone in the economy or buy an asset from consumers. And in contrast to descriptions found in some textbooks, the Bank of England does not directly control the quantity of either base or broad money. The Bank of England is nevertheless still able to influence the amount of money in the economy. It does so in normal times by setting monetary policy — through the interest rate that it pays on reserves held by commercial banks with the Bank of England.

M. McLeay, A. Radia & R. Thomas
Bank of England’s Monetary Analysis Directorate

The money multiplier – neat, plausible, and utterly wrong

The neoclassical textbook concept of money multiplier assumes that banks automatically expand the credit money supply to a multiple of their aggregate reserves.  If the required currency-deposit reserve ratio is 5%, the money supply should be about twenty times larger than the aggregate reserves of banks.  In this way the money multiplier concept assumes that the central bank controls the money supply by setting the required reserve ratio.

In his Macroeconomics – just to take an example – Greg Mankiw writes:

We can now see that the money supply is proportional to the monetary base. The factor of proportionality … is called the money multiplier … Each dollar of the monetary base produces m dollars of money. Because the monetary base has a multiplied effect on the money supply, the monetary base is called high-powered money.

The money multiplier concept is – as can be seen from the quote above – nothing but one big fallacy. This is not the way credit is created in a monetary economy. It’s nothing but a monetary myth that the monetary base can play such a decisive role in a modern credit-run economy with fiat money.

In the real world banks first extend credits and then look for reserves. So the money multiplier basically also gets the causation wrong. At a deep fundamental level the supply of money is endogenous.

One may rightly wonder why on earth this pet neoclassical fairy tale is still in the textbooks and taught to economics undergraduates. Giving the impression that banks exist simply to passively transfer savings into investment, it is such a gross misrepresentation of what goes on in the real world, that there is only one place for it — and that is in the garbage can!

Printing money has no effects on the economy

The creation of money has no effects on the economy as long as the printed money remains in the print shop. It is only when the money gets out into the economy that any effects come about. Money which is newly created and kept locked up might as ell never have been created.

Abba Lerner

Empirical evidence now irrevocably shows banks create money out of thin air

This paper presents the first empirical evidence in the history of banking on the question of whether banks can create money out of nothing. The banking crisis has revived interest in this issue, but it had remained unsettled. Three hypotheses are recognised in the literature. According to the financial intermediation theory of banking, banks are merely intermediaries like other non-bank financial institutions, collecting deposits that are then lent out. According to the fractional reserve theory of banking, individual banks are mere financial intermediaries that cannot create money, but collectively they end up creating money through systemic interaction. A third theory maintains that each individual bank has the power to create money ‘out of nothing’ and does so when it extends credit (the credit creation theory of banking). The question which of the theories is correct has far-reaching implications for research and policy. Surprisingly, despite the longstanding controversy, until now no empirical study has tested the theories. This is the contribution of the present paper. An empirical test is conducted, whereby money is borrowed from a cooperating bank, while its internal records are being monitored, to establish whether in the process of making the loan available to the borrower, the bank transfers these funds from other accounts within or outside the bank, or whether they are newly created. This study establishes for the first time empirically that banks individually create money out of nothing. The money supply is created as ‘fairy dust’ produced by the banks individually, “out of thin air”.

Richard A. Werner

Time to rewrite the textbooks on money creation

This article has discussed how money is created in the modern economy. Most of the money in circulation is created, not by the printing presses of the Bank of England, but by the commercial banks themselves: banks create money whenever they lend to someone in the economy or buy an asset from consumers. And in contrast to descriptions found in some textbooks, the Bank of England does not directly control the quantity of either base or broad money. The Bank of England is nevertheless still able to influence the amount of money in the economy. It does so in normal times by setting monetary policy — through the interest rate that it pays on reserves held by commercial banks with the Bank of England. More recently, though, with Bank Rate constrained by the effective lower bound, the Bank of England’s asset purchase programme has sought to raise the quantity of broad money in circulation. This in turn affects the prices and quantities of a range of assets in the economy, including money.

Michael McLeay, Amar Radia and Ryland Thomas of Bank of England’s Monetary Analysis Directorate

(h/t Phil Pilkington)

Top 10 Economics Blog Posts

1. Dumb and dumber in modern macroeconomics
2. Krugman vs Kelton on the fiscal-monetary tradeoff
3. The wisdom of crowds
4. How money is created
5. Paul Samuelson — a case of badly invested intelligence
6. Keynes’ critique of econometrics
7. The real debt problem
8. Is macroeconomics for real?
9. MMT — Krugman still doesn’t get it!
10. What is ergodicity?

MMT — modern monetary realism

MMT is not, as its opponents seem to think, primarily a set of policy ideas. Rather, it is essentially a description of how a modern credit economy actually works – how money is created and destroyed, by governments and by banks, and how financial markets function. Nor is MMT new: it is based on the work of John Maynard Keynes, whose A Treatise on Money pointed out back in 1930 that “modern States” have functioned this way for thousands of years.

From this description, certain straightforward facts flow. Governments create money by spending and extinguish it via taxation. It follows, therefore, that a large country, borrowing in its own currency, cannot be forced into default. That is why the US is not Greece, and cannot become Venezuela or Zimbabwe.

Does this mean that “deficits don’t matter”? I know of no MMT adherent who has made such a claim. MMT acknowledges that policy can be too expansionary and push past resource constraints, causing inflation and exchange-rate depreciation – which may or may not be desirable. (Hyperinflation, on the other hand, is a bogeyman, which some MMT critics deploy as a scare tactic.)

But the issue with budget deficits isn’t interest rates, which remain under government control. Nor is it the possible crowding out of private investment, which assumes that the pool of finance is fixed. The issue is real resources. Here, MMT’s proposed job guarantee would keep real resource use exactly at the level required for full employment – not less, but also not more.

J K Galbraith