Despite Keynes's General Theory being subtitled "of Employment, Interest and Money," postwar economics never put all that much thought into money. There was a view that gained prominence in the 1970s—monetarism—that thought about money a great deal, and we will examine that view shortly for different purposes. But for most economists from the 1930s on, money was seen in pretty much the same way that Hume saw it 200 years before, as short-run stimulative, long-run neutral, and/or potentially inflationary. Money, it is sometimes said, "changes neither preferences nor possibilities." Money in the form of credit, therefore, is simply one person's nonspending transferred to another person to use for an interest payment plus the return of the principal. Put more simply, one person's debt is another person's income. It's simply a redistribution of existing assets and nothing to get excited about.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 386