A note on “Rethinking liquidity creation: Banks, shadow banks and the elasticity of finance”

Abstract

In their recent article, Yeva Nersisyan and Flavia Dantas proposed to amend the endogenous money theory to account for the activity of nonbank financial institutions (NBFIs) and of foreign banks. It is indeed argued that the traditional post Keynesian and circuitist approaches are overly narrow because they rely on a limited definition of money. Consequently, these approaches are focused on commercial banks (that create money) and regard other financial institutions as mere intermediaries that intermediate funds from surplus units (savers) toward deficit units (borrowers). Because it treats NBFIs as mere intermediaries, the authors argue that the traditional post Keynesian framework is no longer relevant for the analysis of the contemporary financial system. We believe that this critique is not justified. Using balance sheet analysis, we show that the destabilizing role of NBFIs can be taken into account within the traditional post-Keynesian framework.

Keywords:

• Endogenous money
• nonbank financial institutions
• shadow banks
• circuit

Notes

1 We will use balance sheet analysis for the sake of clarity.