Aus der Einleitung:

Swedes do not normally consider themselves as continental people. For them “the Continent” is the land down beyond the Baltic Sea. Yet there is no doubt that Swedish economists figure large in some chapters of the History of Continental Economic Thought – especially in those of the first four decades in this century. The cross fertilization of Continental and Swedish ideas is probably best captured in the contributions of Knut Wicksell. They were strongly influenced by Austrian capital theory and they influenced, in turn, Austrian business-cycle theory as well as much other continental economic thinking in the interwar years. Even though Wicksell published his works originally in German (the Swedish Standard Language of Science in his time), his influence came slowly to reach beyond the continent. Just how far it reached into the non-continental making of mainstream macroeconomics has become a matter of renewed interest – most notably perhaps in two debates that focus differently on Keynes.

The first debate circles around the question in how far the “Keynesian Revolution” was anticipated in the works of Wicksell and the Post-Wicksellians of the “Stockholm School”. The first round of this perennial debate took place in 1936/37, when Bertil Ohlin and other Swedish economists charged that the General Theory hardly offered new insights, but in many respects fell back behind the achievements of the “Stockholm School”. However, more recently Patinkin and others have disputed the claims to Swedish anticipations of the General Theory – mainly on the grounds that the Swedes did not stress the principle of effective demand and therefore gave no clear account of the mechanism by which aggregate income coordinates savings and investment. The other debate started with Leijonhufvud's examination of the Wicksell Connection that Keynes lost in the General Theory when he replaced the interest-rate mechanism as a potential source of coordination failures by his combination of the income mechanism with liquidity preference. This debate also relates to Ohlin in the sense that it centres on the claim that Keynesian theory should be based on a loanable-funds approach to interest-rate theory.

In the following, I will not explicitly discuss what Keynes gained and what he lost in relation to Wicksell and the Stockholm School. My continental focus is on the Swedes, and I wish to draw attention to a somewhat neglected aspect in which they fundamentally differed from the Keynes of the General Theory (and its subsequent IS-LM mainstream interpretation). This aspect is the endogeneity of the money supply, i.e. the determination of the supply of money by the demand for credit. I will argue that the presupposition of a highly elastic supply of credit money played both a crucial and a critical role in the theories of Wicksell, Lindahl, Myrdahl and Ohlin. It opened a new dynamic perspective on monetary economies – a perspective that then was lost in the formation of mainstream macroeconomics. One of the reasons for this loss may be found in the partly inconsistent and partly inconsequent use that the Swedes made of their assumptions about the critical interaction of credit and money.