Analysis of private sector spending, banking, and debt falls broadly into two approaches. One focuses on production and consumption of current goods and services, and the payments involved in this process. Our approach views the economy as a symbiosis of this production and consumption with banking, real estate, and natural resources or monopolies. These rent-extracting sectors are largely institutional in character, and differ among economies according to their financial and fiscal policy. (By contrast, the “real” sectors of all countries usually are assumed to share a similar technology.)

Economic growth does require credit to the real sector, to be sure. But most credit today is extended against collateral, and hence is based on the ownership of assets. As Schumpeter (1934) emphasized, credit is not a “factor of production,” but a precondition for production to take place. Ever since time gaps between planting and harvesting emerged in the Neolithic era, credit has been implicit between the production, sale, and ultimate consumption of output, especially to finance long- distance trade when specialization of labor exists (Gardiner 2004; Hudson 2004a, 2004b). But it comes with a risk of overburdening the economy as bank credit creation affords an opportunity for rentier interests to install financial “tollbooths” to charge access fees in the form of interest charges and currency-transfer agio fees.

Most economic analysis leaves the financial and wealth sector invisible. For nearly two centuries, ever since David Ricardo published his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817, money has been viewed simply as a “veil” affecting commodity prices, wages, and other incomes symmetrically. Mainstream analysis focuses on production, consumption, and incomes. In addition to labor and fixed industrial capital, land rights to charge rent are often classified as a “factor of production,” along with other rent-extracting privileges. Also, it is as if the creation and allocation of interest-bearing bank credit does not affect relative prices or incomes.

It may seem ironic that Ricardo wrote just when Britain’s economy was strapped by war debts in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars that ended in 1815. The previous generation’s writers, from Adam Smith to Malachy Postlethwayt, had explained how the government paid interest on each new bond issue by adding a new excise tax to cover its interest charge (Hudson 2010). These taxes raised the cost of living and doing business, while draining the economy to pay bondholders. Yet, the banks’ Parliamentary spokesman (and indeed, lobbyist) Ricardo established a countervailing orthodoxy by claiming that money, credit, and debt did not really matter as far as production, value, and prices were concerned. His trade theory held that international prices varied only in proportion to their “real” labor costs, without taking money, credit, and debt service into account. Credit payments to bankers, and the distribution of financial assets and debts, are not seen to affect the distribution of income and wealth.

Adam Smith decried monopoly rent, especially for the special trade privileges that the British and other governments created to sell to their bondholders to reduce their war debts. Ricardo emphasized the free lunch of land rent: prices in excess of the cost of production on lands with better than marginal fertility, or implicitly on sites benefiting from favorable location. But like Smith, he treated interest as a normal cost of doing business, and hence as part of the production sector, not as an extractive rentier charge autonomous and independent from the economy of production and consumption. On this ground, he omitted banks and monopolies from his discussion of economic rent — on the assumption that their income was payment for a productive service, and hence interest seemed to be a necessary cost of production.

This assumption underlies today’s National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA). Everyone’s “income” (not including capital gains, which make no appearance in the NIPA) finds its counterpart in a “product,” in this case a service for financial income. Most revenue — and certainly most ebitda (short for “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization”) — is generated within the FIRE sector. But is it actually part of the “real” economy’s sphere of production, consumption, and distribution (in which case it is income); or is it a charge on this sphere (in which case it is rent)? This is the distinction that Frederick Soddy (1926) drew between real wealth and “virtual wealth” on the liabilities side of society’s balance sheet.

To answer this question, it is necessary to divide the economy into a “productive” portion that creates income and surplus, and an “extractive” rentier portion siphoning off this surplus as rents: that is, as payments for property rights, credit, or kindred privileges. These are the payments on which the institutionalist school focused in the late nineteenth century. A key policy aim of the institutionalist school was to regulate prices and revenue of public utilities and monopolies in keeping with purely “economic” costs of production, which the classical economists defined as value (Hudson 2012).

Our aim is to revive the distinction between value and rent, which is all but lost in contemporary analysis. Only then can we understand how the bubble economy’s pseudo-prosperity was fueled by credit flows — debt pyramiding — to inflate asset markets in the process of transferring ownership rights to whomever was willing to take on the largest debt.

To analyze this dynamic, we must recognize that we live in “two economies.” The “real” economy is where goods and services are produced and transacted, tangible capital formation occurs, labor is hired, and productivity is boosted. Most productive income consists of wages and profits. The rentier network of financial and property claims — “Economy #2” — is where interest and economic rent are extracted. Unfortunately, this distinction is blurred in official statistics. The NIPA conflate “rental income” with “earnings,” as if all gains are “earned.” Nothing seems to be unearned or extractive. The “rent” category of revenue — the focus of two centuries of classical political economy — has disappeared into an Orwellian memory hole.

National accounts have been recast since the 1980s to present the financial and real estate sectors as “productive” (Christophers 2011). Conversely, much of the notional household income in national accounts does not exist in cash flow terms (net of interest and taxes). Barry Z. Cynamon and Steven M. Fazzari (2015) estimate that U.S. NIPA-imputed household incomes overstate actual incomes in cash flow terms by about a third.

That is what makes the seemingly empirical accounting format used in most economic analysis an expression of creditor-oriented pro-rentier ideology. Households do not receive incomes from the houses they live in. The value of the “services” their homes provide does not increase simply because house prices rise, as the national accounts fiction has it. The financial sector does not produce goods or even “real” wealth. And to the extent that it produces services, much of this serves to redirect revenues to rentiers, not to generate wages and profits.

The fiction is that all debt is required for investment in the economy’s means of production. But banks monetize debt, and attach it to the economy’s means of production and anticipated future income streams. In other words, banks do not produce goods, services, and wealth, but claims on goods, services, and wealth — i.e., Soddy’s “virtual wealth.” In the process, bank credit bids up the price of such claims and privileges because these assets are worth however much banks are willing to lend against it.

To the extent that the FIRE sector accounts for the increase in GDP, this must be paid out of other GDP components. Trade in financial and real estate assets is a zero-sum (or even negative-sum) activity, comprised largely of speculation and extracting revenue, not producing “real” output. The long-term impact must be to increase debt-to-GDP ratios, and ultimately to stifle GDP growth as the financial bubble gives way to debt deflation, austerity, unemployment, defaults, and forfeitures. This is the sense in which today’s financial sector is subject to classical rent theory, distinguishing real wealth creation from mere overhead.

“Money” consists mainly of credit creation since “loans create deposits” (McLeay, Radia and Thomas 2014). So any increase in the sum of final GDP goods-and-services transactions is mirrored in bank credit supporting these transactions (alongside inter-firm trade credit, and now money market placements as well). But since the 1980s, bank lending has risen relative to GDP (that is, relative to income). Much of the credit created since then has been used not for production, but for asset price inflation, driving up costs of living. Consumers — especially those who own real estate, stocks, and bonds — have run deeper into debt in order to maintain their living standards. Real wages have fallen a bit, while after-tax costs of living have increased.

In the United States, FICA wage withholding for Social Security and Medicare has risen to 15.2 percent, medical insurance costs have risen, education charges have risen for buyers of educational diplomas, and the mortgage bubble (which Alan Greenspan euphemized as “wealth creation”) has driven up the price of obtaining a home. It is now recognized that U.S. living standards since the 1970s have become debt-fueled, not income-supported. This went largely unnoticed until the bubble burst, since the underlying distinction in credit flows has been excluded from the economics curriculum.