Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T17:12:21.914Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Money, Credit and Bank Behaviour: Need for a New Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

C.A.E. Goodhart*
Affiliation:
Financial Markets Group, London School of Economics

Extract

The standard approach, in teaching and textbooks, to explaining the determination of both the supply of money, and the provision of bank credit to the private sector, has been the money multiplier approach, whereby the Central Bank sets the high-powered monetary base, and then the stock of money is a multiple of that. The greatest book on Monetary History ever written, Friedman and Schwartz (1963), Monetary History of the United States, was constructed around this same analytical framework of the money multiplier, whereby M, the money supply, would increase by a large multiple of the change in the high-powered monetary base, H.

M=H⋅(1+C/D)(R/D+C/D)
Yet when the authorities in the major developed countries attempted to use this relationship to expand the money stock (and bank lending) by force-feeding the banks with base money (H), in the process of Quantitative Easing (QE) in 2009, the prior relationships collapsed.

Type
The UK Economy
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I am grateful to Rafael Repullo for advice and comments and to Nelson Camanho Costa-Neto for research assistance. All remaining errors are my own.

References

Brainard, W. and Tobin, J. (1963), ‘Financial intermediaries and the effectiveness of monetary controls’, American Economic Review, 53, May, pp. 384–86.Google Scholar
Carson, D. (ed.) (1963), Banking and Monetary Studies, Homewood, Ill., Richard D. Irwin Inc.Google Scholar
Disyatat, P. (2008), ‘Monetary policy implementation: misconceptions and their consequences’, Bank of International Settlements Working Paper 269, December.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedman, M. and Schwartz, A.J. (1963), A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, National Bureau of Economic Research, Princeton, Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Goodhart, C.A.E. (1975), Money, Information and Uncertainty, London, Macmillan Press Ltd.Google Scholar
Goodhart, C.A.E. (1984), Money, Theory and Practice: The UK Experience, London, Macmillan Press Ltd.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodhart, C.A.E. (2009), ‘The continuing muddles of monetary theory: a steadfast refusal to face facts’, Economica, 76, pp. 821–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodhart, C., Baker, M. and Sleeman, C. (2009), ‘Quantitative easing: necessary, successful and ready to wind down’, UK Economics, Morgan Stanley Research Europe, 23 November.Google Scholar
Gurley, J. and Shaw, E.S. (1960), Money in a Theory of Finance, Washington, D.C., The Brookings Institute.Google Scholar
Johnson, H. (1962), ‘Monetary theory and policy’, American Economic Review, 52, June, pp. 335–84.Google Scholar
Keister, T. and McAndrews, J. (2009), ‘Why are banks holding so many excess reserves?’, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Report 380, July.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keynes, J.M. (1930), A Treatise on Money, London, Macmillan and (1971) New York, St. Martin's Press.Google Scholar
Palley, T. (2010), ‘The troubling economics and politics of paying interest on bank reserves: a critique of the Federal Reserve's exit strategy’, paper prepared for a session titled ‘Countercyclical Macroeconomic Policies’ held at the meetings of the Eastern Economic Association held in Philadelphia, PA, February 26-28.Google Scholar
Perez-Quiros, G. and Mendizábal, H.R. (2010), ‘Asymmetric standing facilities: an unexploited monetary policy tool’, Banco de Espana Documentos de Trabajo 1004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Phillips, C.A. (1920), Bank Credit, New York, Macmillan.Google Scholar
Robbins, L. (1932), An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, London, Macmillan.Google Scholar
Sayers, R.S. (1957), Central Banking After Bagehot, Oxford, Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Sayers, R.S. (1976), The Bank of England 1891-1944, Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tobin, J. (1963), ‘Commercial banks as creators of “money”‘, Chapter 22 in Carson (1963) op.cit., pp. 408–19.Google Scholar
Woodford, M. (2008), ‘How important is money in the conduct of monetary policy?, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, 40, 8, pp. 1561–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar