The vast bulk of money created - around 70% in the UK -came into existence as mortgage loans, and - due to the nature of fractional reserve banking - is the direct cause of property (actually LAND) price inflation.

Much other credit=money is also secured against assets, and again, is not actually in circulation, but is "static".

Clearly it is the case that is only a relatively small amount of credit=money which circulates as Society's "working capital".

Some of this is created by banks and is being recycled in the way you mention ie short-term credits. But there is a huge amount of other value in circulation - interest-free - as well, and that derives from "trade" credit.

As far as economists are concerned, I suspect that this trade credit barely appears on the radar screen at all, since it is not bank-created credit.

Correct me if I am wrong: I am not familiar with the Alice in Wonderland World of national accounting. It does my head in.

The simple fact of the matter is that wherever a business barter system - such as the Swiss WIR, or proprietary barter systems like Bartercard - allows participants "time to pay" aka bilateral trade "credit", then the result is a "bank-less" monetary system requiring a "Value Unit" - typically a "Trade Pound" or a "Trade Dollar".

This demonstrates empirically that Banks are entirely unnecessary credit intermediaries and could quite easily provide their only REAL value creation (that of a guarantee of a borrower's credit) as a service provider instead.

What you are missing is that it is the payment of interest on the enormous "fixed capital" stock that is driving the requirement for economic growth.

This is the real Inconvenient Truth which virtually all schools of economic thought gloss over through the use of faulty assumptions.

Capital - by which I mean assets, such as land, intellectual property,anything "owned" by companies and so on, which are the subject of property rights - is "productive", in the same way that Labour is productive.

Both have a value in use, and they combine to create "Value" - which is indefinable, but which I prefer to call "Money's Worth".

Conventional economics would have it that when a factory is automated through vast capital investment, the sole remaining employee who switches it on and off magically becomes infinitely "productive".

Complete balderdash.

However, it suits those who (increasingly) own the bulk of assets that any consideration of the inequitable distribution of capital assets, and particularly property rights in "commons", should essentially be defined out of discussion or consideration.

No equitable taxation system would fail to tax the privilege of private property rights over commons such as land and knowledge.

But our modern day to day narrative does not even permit consideration of such a possibility.

I digress.

My point is that you simply ignore the fact that the driver for economic growth is nothing to do with the financing of money in circulation (which actually need cost nothing, other than shared costs of administration and defaults) and everything to do with the financing of a nation's "Capital Stock".

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson

The neoclassical fantasy was that there was something intrinsic about that allocation of the earned income between wage income and profit income, when it is, after all, a social system rather than a physical one. Many traditional marginalist economists still cling to that fantasy.

But as long as the fresh injections into the spending-income-spending loop are stable and the proportions leaking out of the same loop are stable, then any arbitrary allocation of profit and wages that allows those working in the ongoing enterprise to survive (whether they gain their allocation as a wage share, profit share, or mix of both), then that system is reproducible.

The sustainable steady state benchmark is a far more useful benchmark than the traditional economic fantasy of general equilibrium markets all around. A sustainable steady state is not sufficient for sustainability ... the system also has to be able to respond to shocks upsetting a sustainable steady state and settle back into a sustainable steady state ... but it sure as heck is necessary.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.