Locked-in and Sticky Textbooks: Mainstream Teaching of the Money Supply Process

Martijn Boermans and Basil Moore

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Current macro-economic textbooks provide a fatally misleading description of the money supply process in modern economies. Over the past 20 years Post Keynesian authors have established conclusively that despite strictly-enforced cash reserve requirements, changes in the supply of bank deposits are not determined exogenously by central bank open market operations, but are endogenously determined by changes in bank borrowers’ demand for credit. Nevertheless the vast majority of undergraduate macroeconomic textbooks continue to teach the high-powered-base “money-multiplier” paradigm that the supply of money is exogenously determined by the central bank. Few texts recognize that interest rate targeting renders the high-powered base endogenous. This paper summarizes the extent mainstream macroeconomic textbooks are “locked in” and “sticky,” and fail both in the teaching of monetary policy and in proper scientific discourse.

Keywords: macroeconomic textbooks; money supply; endogenous money paradigm; EMP; Post Keynesian economics; paradigm shift (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A14 A20 B5 E12 E41 E51 E52 E58 I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-11, Revised 2009-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-mac and nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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