The Monetary Theory of Production and the Supermultiplier: What Determines Savings?

The paper presents a closed-economy stock-flow consistent model aimed at outlining the natural synthesis between two fundamental pillars of the post-Keynesian approach: the supermultiplier (SM) model and the monetary theory of production based on the notion of endogenous money. Such integration allows the defining of the whole economic mechanism describing the financing of autonomous components and investments, as well as the determination of output and saving within a monetary economy of production. Our contribution argues that the endogenous money theory plays a non-ancillary role within the SM approach. By comparing different scenarios describing the financing of autonomous components of demand and investments (bank loans, retained profits, CB, and equity emissions), we point out that the endogenous process of money creation is the only structural mechanism through which the autonomous components can exist and be independent of current income, and Keynesian causality materializes in the long-run. In general, it is the initial finance of investments and autonomous components through endogenous money that allows them to be ex-post founded by household saving. Conversely, the initial finance through the existing stock of wealth, although it does not intact the investments-saving causality, can be considered only a temporary spin-off of the endogenous money process.