January 08, 2020

Marc Lavoie, University of Ottawa

We are being asked whether we support the traditional intermediation view of banking or the money-creation view. The second scholarly article that I ever published, 37 years ago, was a presentation of the arguments providing support to the so-called endogenous theory of money, as post-Keynesian economists like to call it, or what Richard Werner calls the credit-creation theory of banking. Thus, in response to the question put to us, influenced by my readings of some French monetary specialists, in particular Jacques Le Bourva, I would answer that I have long rejected the traditional intermediation view and endorsed instead the money-creation view. This view of banking denies that banks are constrained by prior deposits or by the amount of reserves in the system, since the causal arrow goes from loans to deposits to reserves. When making new loans, loan officers don’t phone up other departments to find out whether there are enough deposits in the bank or whether there are excess reserves. Relative to the traditional intermediation view, there is reversed causation. There is no money multiplier; at best one could speak of a credit divisor.
More “Banking: Intermediation or Money Creation
M. Lavoie, Endorsing the Money-creation View”