The Loanable Funds Market
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
- Explain how the loanable funds market models the financial sector
- Explain how the orthodox economists understand thrift to be an important source for economic growth
As you learned earlier in the chapter, orthodox economists believe that, at least in the long run, capitalist economies should naturally tend toward full employment through adjustments in prices (including wages). However, there is one potential problem: what happens when the households that participated in creating the output (as workers, landlords, capitalists, and so on), decide not to use their income to purchase that output? That is, what happens when income is saved?
The solution to this problem in the orthodox framework is an additional type of factor market: the loanable funds market. Through this market, household savings are channelled into business loans for investment. As a result, any income not spent (that is, saved) becomes investment, which of course is a type of spending. All of this is the really just another way of ensuring that in this model Say’s Law holds: supply creates its own demand, and if there is less supply than is possible (at full employment), or insufficient demand to purchase that supply, then price adjustments will correct the imbalances.
The Loanable Funds Market
In the loanable funds market, the price is the interest rate and the thing being exchanged is money. This should be intuitive: the interest rate is the return (or reward) you earn for saving your money; the higher the interest rate, the more inclined you will be to save.
Businesses, in turn, are the demanders in loanable funds market. Here, businesses are borrowing the money households save so that they can make real investments–for instance, buying a new fleet of delivery vans or upgrading the office computers’ software. As is the usual case, demand declines with price. For the loanable funds market, this means that, the lower the interest rate, the greater the amount of money businesses will want to borrow, since the interest rate is the cost of taking out the loan.
Looking to the figure below, we can see that, when the supply of loanable funds is at S0, the equilibrium (E0) occurs at an 8% interest rate and a quantity of funds loaned and borrowed of $10 billion. This suggests that, at an 8% interest rate, households will be saving a total of $10 billion. By definition, this means that households aren’t spending $10 billion of their income, which is a problem for Say’s Law: output is $10 billion higher than household spending. But, of course, at an 8% interest rate, businesses will be borrowing $10 billions and, most importantly, spending that money on real investment.
Hence, the problem of saving is solved: so long as the interest rate adjusts to equilibrium in the loanable funds market, any income not spent (that is, money saved) will ultimately become spending through investment. In a se