Mathew Forstater writes: > >1. What about the role of credit, modern financial institutions, and >government policies in decreasing the need to rely on a pool of 'savings' >to finance investment? As James Akiaphor responded, the resources to finance any of these options must have eventually come from income earned from productive activity by individuals or firms. Those activities do not decrease the need to rely on a pool of saving, rather, as many of the "classical" as well as inter-war economists understood, it decreases the need to rely on the public's *voluntary* saving. Hence the many debates over the notion of "forced saving," or in D. H. Robertson's terms "auto- matic lacking." Government policies designed to stimulate consumption in ways other than those that encourage general economic productivity must acquire the purchasing power they transfer to some members of the public from other members of the public. Steve Horwitz St. Lawrence University [log in to unmask]