[RobertoG]

>"[..] it says more about you than the economists..."

I think I will be cavalier about that comment.

>"[..] what mainstream economists really believe [..]"

This is something that always puzzle me in this kind of discussion, maybe you can help me with that. What mainstream economists really believe?

I mean, here (1) is a review of what text-books say about money creation. In my opinion (and it seems yours too) this is not the same that we see in practice.

So, my question would be, do mainstream economist believe different things that what they write in the textbooks?

(1)- https://ac.els-cdn.com/S1057521915001477/1-s2.0-S10575219150...

[notahacker]

Undergraduate physics textbooks provide introductory examples using simple friction-free Newtonian classical mechanics. It's just there isn't a school of dissident physicists citing undergraduate textbooks to argue that the mainstream physics profession consists of stupid ignoramuses who don't believe in friction.

And the reality of money creation is pretty fuzzy too and depends a lot on what you define as "money supply" and the "banking sector" (funnily enough, even pretty basic physics has a degree of this problem too, which is why you get concepts of waves and particles that both fit some of the facts, though you don't get anyone inside or outside the mainstream very strongly committed to arguing against wave-particle duality...).

Ultimately private banks both intermediate between deposits and savers and create credit borrowed from central banks. They're only permitted to do the latter because their role in doing the former makes the government unwilling to let them fail. The "credit creation" emphasisers are right to emphasise that the limits on individual bank credit creation are soft because the "bank capital" they are permitted to borrow against is not a fixed variable, the intermediation emphasisers are right to note that when the commercial banking system borrows more money, the central bank tends to pull money out of the rest of the economy in the very short term, and propose raising interest rates in the slightly less short term, and so the banking system is only really able to expand the money supply when the central bank is comfortable with it doing so.

More generally, it's possible to entirely agree with Werner and MMT on banks' present role being far better described as primarily one of credit creation and entirely disagree with their respective alternative preferred policy approaches to central banking (or vice versa for that matter). What mainstream economists are primarily concerned with is the principle that raising interest rates for a variety of reasons (including but not limited to its effect on demand for bank credit) somewhat reduces inflation (and demand) and lowering them somewhat increases demand (and inflation) which is pretty much the most theoretically and empirically sound conclusion ever reached in macroeconomics (despite a few edge cases where it might not be true).

[RobertoG]

So, if I understand what you are telling me, when, for instance, Krugman, write his text book and his New York Times columns, he is just writing a simplification.

Because he thinks that the notion that private banks create money as an account operation, and they search reserves after giving a credit, and not before, is too complicate for his readers.

Fair enough, but you have to recognize that, then, it's not so strange, and hardly their fault, that MMT economists end writing "straw men" posts (as you said before).

[dragonwriter]

> So, if I understand what you are telling me, when, for instance, Krugman, write his text book and his New York Times columns, he is just writing a simplification.

Any time an expert is writing for a non-expert audience, they are usually writing a simplification tailored for the audience and the purpose of the writing.

> Because he thinks that the notion that private banks create money as an account operation, and they search reserves after giving a credit, and not before, is too complicate for his readers.

Or because the general idea of a multiplier effect works either way, and his columns are unlikely to depend on the mechanics of the simplified computation of the multiplier as an estimator of the maximum level of the multiplier effect under the simplifying assumptions that apply to that calculation.

If you have a specific problematic column in mind, we could have a less abstract discussion about the problem you have with it.

[RobertoG]

Sorry for the late answer, I have a life ;-)

Anyway, I don't think our discussion is going to arrive anywhere.

You ask for Krugman (who is a guy that I like by the way) opinions:

https://www.cnbc.com/id/46944145

For me, what he says there is in clear contradiction with (for instance):

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105752191...

It seems to me that whatever it is what they put in their textbooks, even more important is what they put in their models.

Here there is a good criticism of Krugman views: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/04/scott-fullwiler-krug...

But if they didn't solve it, we are not going to neither.

[AnimalMuppet]

One would expect that MMT economists might understand what mainstream economists think, and understand it at a somewhat deeper level than that of an NYT column. One would therefore expect that they could avoid strawmen, because they could argue against the mainstream economists' real position.