Horizontalists and Verticalists

Book excerpt: Challenging the validity of much of mainstream macroeconomics, Basil Moore argues that the money supply in modern economies is not under the control of central banks, but rather is determined by borrower demand for bank credit. He then explores the implications of this perception for conventional macroeconomic theory. Mainstream analysis takes the view that central banks have it in their power to initiate exogenous changes in the nominal supply of money. In contrast to this "verticalist" view, this book contends that the supply of credit money is endogenous, and responds to changes in the demand for bank credit. This new "horizontalist" view holds that cental banks have the ability to set the supply price of money through short term interest rates, but not the quantity of money. Concluding that a new macroeconomic paradigm must be developed, Moore attempts to initiate the larger task of theory reconstruction that lies ahead.