In the natural sciences, controversies are settled in a few months, or at a time of crisis, in a year or two, but in the social so-called sciences, absurd misunderstandings can continue for sixty or a hundred years without being cleared up.

– Joan Robinson, 1981 (1979), What Are The Questions And Other Essays – Further Contributions To Modern Economics, M.E. Sharpe

The latest Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin (2014 Q1) will be released on the 14th. It has pre-released two articles which go into money creation and the myths associated with it. 

The report is here. The second article Money creation in the modern economy may interest you more but the first is also readable.

Interestingly, the second pape refers to Post-Keynesians : Tom Palley’s 1996 book , Basil Moore’s 1988 book, a JPKE paper by Peter Howells and a 1981 paper by Nicholas Kaldor and J. Trevithick which discusses the reflux mechanism (reprinted in Kaldor’s Collected Economic Essays, Vol. 9). It also refers to James Tobin’s 1963 paper Commercial Banks As Creators Of “Money”. 

One negative is the omission of fiscal policy from the discussion altogether and emphasising monetary policy. This underplay of fiscal policy and overemphasis of monetary policy is one deep bias of the profession. The paper also has a slightly different emphasis on what determines the quantity of lending than emphasized by Post-Keynesians but I won’t go into it now. Still the page is worth a look.