Session “Socially Useful Financial Systems” Bezemer – ‘When Credit Helps, and When it Hinders’ Finance and Growth: When Credit Helps, and When it Hinders Dirk J Bezemer, University Groningen (
[email protected] ) EXTENDED SUMMARY The financial sector can support growth but it can also cause crisis. The present crisis has exposed gaps in economists’ understanding of this dual potential. This paper grounds an alternative approach in the credit nature of money, and in an older distinction between credit flows that grow the economy of goods and services (the GDP), and credit that inflates markets for financial assets and property. This increases the debt-to-GDP ratio and can be a helpful catalyst of the real sector. But if it overshoots, it leads to bloated financial markets and the pursuit of capital gains rather than profit, with rising costs due to high asset values, rising inequality, falling fixed capital formation, rising uncertainty, and fraud and corruption. Unfortunately, overshooting is built into the system due to the nature of money, banking and compound interest. That is why financial deregulation leads to credit booms and busts. A return to financially sustainable growth in the longer term requires a shrinking of the mortgage, consumer credit and nonbank financial sector which is a creditor to the real sector, and absorbs a continuing flow of liquidity in interest payment and financial fees that would otherwise be effective demand for goods and services, supporting economic growth. Financial deregulation has allowed the US ‘FIRE’ sector to grow to about three times the size it had in the 1980s and so its claims on the real sector are three times larger than a quarter century ago.