Habría jurado que fue usted el que pegó el artículo ese del crédito… hold on 
Robert Solow (1994: 45) made a remarkable statement: “Schumpeter is a kind of patron saint in this field. Perhaps I am the only one who thinks he should be treated like a patron saint: paraded one day a year and more or less ignored the rest of the time .” Our contribution shows that Schumpeter, although ritually paraded in the literature, has in fact been de facto ignored or, worse, misinterpreted. The finance and growth literature is dominated by the loanable funds theory or ‘real analysis’, which is in direct contrast to the ‘monetary analysis’ that Schumpeter propagated. This misinterpretation is not only a problem for the history of economic thought; it has also led theoretical and empirical research down the wrong track. Nothing reflects this more than the inability to explain the process of ‘liquidity creation’ simply and realistically. The lack of empirical evidence for the main transmission channels of the literature and the evidence for the hypotheses of the ‘true’ Schumpeter have implications that go beyond the finance–growth nexus. They call into question the entire macroeconomic literature on finance (e.g. Mian et al. 2021a, 2021b), which is still based on the paradigm of real analysis, where the monetary sphere is nothing but a disguised real sphere.