IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/126638.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

On Significant Misunderstandings in Macroeconomics

Author

Listed:
  • Tanaka, Yasuhito

Abstract

I present arguments on significant misunderstandings in macroeconomics about relationship between investment and savings. I will show that investment and savings are undertaken by the same economic agent. To summarize the meaning of Investment = Savings most simply, (setting aside the government and overseas factors) since savings are defined as income minus consumption, spending money on consumption increases the recipient's income without changing savings. Spending money on investment also increases the recipient's income, but since it's not consumption, the “minus consumption” component doesn't occur, so savings increase. Therefore, investment equals savings. The intermediary function of banks has nothing to do with it. Excluding the government and overseas sectors, total financial assets amount to zero. Therefore, savings in the equation investment = savings do not represent the accumulation of financial assets. Instead, investment represents the accumulation of fixed assets. Consequently, this savings also constitutes an increase in fixed assets. Both investment and savings involve spending money to purchase goods. Defining savings as income minus consumption minus investment yields savings = fiscal deficit plus current account surplus. This correctly represents changes in financial assets.

Suggested Citation

  • Tanaka, Yasuhito, 2025. "On Significant Misunderstandings in Macroeconomics," MPRA Paper 126638, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:126638
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/126638/1/MPRA_paper_126638.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • E00 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:126638. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.