After the Lehman crisis, in the United States the monetary base has increased dramatically, while broad money and inflation have risen to a modest extent. There is broad consensus that this is due to the significant decrease in the money multiplier. In most papers, including Cukierman (2017), this decrease is due to the limited availability of banks to provide credit given the stringent regulatory constraints to which they are subject. Here it is argued, instead, that the fall of the money multiplier is due to the profound reduction in the demand for loans from the private sector. The different trend of this demand explains why, with the same growth of the monetary base, the money multiplier increased in Germany between 1921 and 1922 and decreased in recent years in the United States.