The quote is from Prof Richard Werner of the University of Southampton’s school of management, who spoke at The European Conference on Banking and the Economy conference.

Via David Jones:

“Prof. Werner was also remarkably candid about the intellectual disgrace at the heart of the economics profession: its near total suppression of “dissident” thoughts. He described “journals I am forced to publish in” (!) that will not allow the submission of academic papers mentioning the role of credit creation in the economy, stating that “if you try to publish in these journals, it is a taboo word.” one “virtually banned from the so-called leading journals for decades”.

And this suppression of an inconvenient truth apparently extends all the way down to undergraduate economics teaching. Here is an absolutely mind-boggling quotation Prof. Werner lifted from one of the most widely used undergraduate economics textbooks:

“Including money in the models would only obscure the analysis”

I suggest reading the above quote several times, to fully grasp its koan like properties! Its deployment prompted a great deal of spontaneous laughter amongst members of the audience, including myself. This is an issue Prof. Steve Keen of the University of Western Sydney often raises, but I still find absolutely incomprehensible – models by professional mainstream economists do not include money, debt or banks!

Prof Werner’s answer to the Queen of England’s question to economists “Why didn’t you see this coming?” was “Because they didn’t have money in their models!”

There was also an interesting story about Alan Greenspan, who apparently wrote an economics paper in 1967 discussing Credit Creation. He later went to work for the US Federal Reserve. Prof. Werner used the Reuters search engine to look for “Alan Greenspan” and “Credit Creation” appearing together in any speech made on behalf of the FED. The result? ZERO hits. No doubt in such an official position it is smarter not to raise awareness of a process most of the public would be opposed to, if they actually knew about it!”