by From Lars Syll Evidently this phenomenon is peculiar to money and has no analogue in the world of commodities. No claim to sheep increases the number of sheep. But a deposit, though legally only a claim to legal-tender money, serves within very wide limits the same purposes that this money itself would serve. Banks do not, of course, ‘create’ legal- tender money and still less do they ‘create’ machines. They do, however, something—it is perhaps easier to see this in the case of the issue of banknotes—which, in its economic effects, comes pretty near to creating legal-tender money and which may lead to the creation of ‘real capital’ that could not have been created without this practice. But this alters the analytic situation profoundly and makes it highly inadvisable to construe bank
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from Lars Syll
Evidently this phenomenon is peculiar to money and has no analogue in the world of commodities. No claim to sheep increases the number of sheep. But a deposit, though legally only a claim to legal-tender money, serves within very wide limits the same purposes that this money itself would serve. Banks do not, of course, ‘create’ legal- tender money and still less do they ‘create’ machines. They do, however, something—it is perhaps easier to see this in the case of the issue of banknotes—which, in its economic effects, comes pretty near to creating legal-tender money and which may lead to the creation of ‘real capital’ that could not have been created without this practice.
But this alters the analytic situation profoundly and makes it highly inadvisable to construe bank credit on the model of existing funds’ being withdrawn from previous uses by an entirely imaginary act of saving and then lent out by their owners. It is much more realistic to say that the banks ‘create credit,’ that is, that they create deposits in their act of lending, than to say that they lend the deposits that have been entrusted to them. And the reason for insisting on this is that depositors should not be invested with the insignia of a role which they do not play. The theory to which economists clung so tenaciously makes them out to be savers when they neither save nor intend to do so; it attributes to them an influence on the ‘supply of credit’ which they do not have. The theory of ‘credit creation’ not only recognizes patent facts without obscuring them by artificial constructions; it also brings out the peculiar mechanism of saving and investment that is characteristic of fullfledged capitalist society and the true role of banks in capitalist evolution. With less qualification than has to be added in most cases, this theory therefore constitutes definite advance in analysis.