Tag: economics

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Toothless Watchdog

The International Monetary Fund, the IMF, has described the chancellor’s plans to make draconian cuts as, quoting from the Daily Mail here, “strong, credible and essential”. This is being trumpeted in some quarters as being a ringing endorsement of Osborne’s policies – but from whom does it come exactly? Many would suggest the IMF themselves have little idea of what’s what economically, their own credibility standing open to question since along with the majority of economists they were conspicuously NOT howling iceberg at the tops of their voices in 2007.
What good are they then, and what merit has their opinion?

BB

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The Black Heart Of Banking

Banks don’t actually need any capital base at all, they can make money up from the thin air at will (setting aside the dictates of the BIS which is biased on the side of the banks) and gift it or loan it at .01% interest to deserving business and so promote the creation of wealth. It’s the natural way of doing things. We’ve been bought up with a set of beliefs themselves entirely artificial and wholly against our interests so that an artificial economic elite may be created and sustained. This is what’s causing the the current poverty and this is what’s going to have to end. We are witnessing a global banking dynasty, its very existence unsuspected by the majority, in its death throes. I don’t know what the immediate future might hold but I’m sure of one thing; it ain’t gonna be pretty 🙁

BB

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Greece Circles The Drain

Bad times behind and ahead for Greece and the rest of Europe too, us in the UK particularly. Predictably enough to everyone except politicians, apparently, the austerity neasures adopted first in Greece and then here in the UK have resulted not in Greece leaping like Prometheus unbound from the depths of the recession but finding themselves in even worse straits instead.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,712511,00.html

We’re next!
All this is inevitable as austerity measures are a two-edged sword; not only do they reduce public spending on the one hand but they also reduce private spending as its implementation means people simply haven’t got the money to spend. The one thing it does do is make the rich richer by comparison by making the poor even worse off than they were previously. It’s difficult not to think that the motley crew of public schoolboys and old Etonians in government aren’t fully aware of this even if the broader public aren’t.

BB

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Same Old Cable Service

Vince Cable is in the news again for criticising the banks. Is he raging against the whole idea that only the privately-owned banks and government itself can create legal tender, highlighting how hopelessly unfair this system is to the rest of us and offering a fistful of credible alternatives?

Well, no – he’s moaning about banker’s bonuses again.

Go Vince. 

BB

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No Reserve Banking

It’s suggested that the banks have had a stern warning from the Toronto G20. I say that’s nonsense. What would really upset the banks is the re-introduction of narrow banking, and I see no signs of that, or genuine competition like encouragement of public bank ownership and I see no signs of that either. I think that FRB is outmoded, any kind of reserve is outmoded and unecessary for a public bank as business needs what it needs and an enlightened culture will understand that it can be funded by the printing press without limit so long as money is created to support sound business in appropriate amounts. Any inflation would be technical not functional, and transient. Anyway, the banks have survived the G20 with their government guarantees intact, have they not? They can still take customers’ money, put it on the financial equivalent of the 3.30 at Kempton, award themselves huge bonuses if they win and apply for the taxpayer to bail them out if they lose. Banks uber alles! This is anti-social nonsense and it needs to end.

BB

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Economics Game-Changer

The phrase ‘fractional reserve banking’, together with a reference to banks lending more money than they actually have, has finally appeared in a UK mainstream paper. Edmun Conway in the Telegraph recently penned the following:”Capitalist societies chose some decades ago to have a “fractional reserve banking” system – where banks lend out more cash than they have in their vaults – because this helps provide money for companies and households to invest.”

http://tinyurl.com/3yr6za3

Well. that does change things, doesn’t it…. its a first so far as I know. Good stuff – the more these things are bought out into the open and properly discussed, the sooner we can end the banking oligarchy and get community banking set up and bring wealth back to the people who earn it. More please!

BB

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Myners Gets The Bird

Here’s former financial services minister Paul Myners in the house recently, attacking the government of which he was a part;

“There is nothing progressive about a government that consistently spends more than it can raise in taxation…” he says and goes on to criticise Labour’s economic policies as “flawed economic thinking”. 

Um. Would consistently spending money created out of nothing either by quantitative easing or fractional reserve banking and using it to fund business endeavours, the kind large and small that at the moment are either never getting past the conceptual stage or being starved of funds into administration, that would be regarded then by the great Lord Myners as nothing progressive? I think that for a time at least it’s exactly what this country needs, an alternative money supply to the private banks, one readily available and quite prepared to lend cheaply to foster business creation and support until businesses are bringing in enough mony (and so taxation) for the stimulus to be withdrawn or reconsidered… bring it on, I say, and the sooner the better. Such a shame there’s no discussion of this in the House… 

http://www.politics.co.uk/news/legal-and-constitutional/myners-attacks-his-former-colleagues-$21379502.htm

BB

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Government Loans

I’m watching David ‘Dave’ Cameron live on TV at this moment, earnestly (and quite rightly) explaining how the interest we pay on loans to the government are overwhelming us. True enough, and the subject deserves an airing. However, I note he isn’t pointing out that much of the National Debt is to banks, banks who haven’t actually loaned money they already had to the government but instead have loaned money created out of thin air using their authority to do so granted to them by that same government. This doesn’t get a mention, where the National Debt actually comes from. The banks conjure money from the air under license from the government, loan it to the government at interest and we, the taxpayers, have to find real money out of our pockets to pay it back with. Nice work for the banks, you might think, and it is – but what about us the electorate – aren’t our politicians supposed to be working for our interests, and not the banks? Shouldn’t all debts created under this Alice In Wonderland system be voided in full? Where’s the discussion about why we, or any nation, should have such a thing as a national debt in the first place???

BB

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Goldman Sachs

the damage is done… if you make serious money and it’s in a way that most people would disapprove of, perhaps violently, and if it’s handled by someone on your behalf at any stage, you want to keep your head well below the parapet and also you want your brokers (or whoever) to be keeping their heads down too. You don’t want their names in headlines. I think this is the end for Goldman Sachs whatever the outcome of the SEC’s prosecution, whether it’s successful in the punitive sense or not.

BB

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Taxing The Banks…

The problem with the banks is not bonuses or their pricing, it’s that they and they alone are allowed to create money. This gives them a unique advantage over the rest of the population, seeing as we all need it and no-one else is allowed to create it (save, of course, our government, who choose not to supply the electorate with money where it’s needed, either at interest or for free, but instead pack people off to the banks where they’re encouraged to borrow it at interest).
This very much needs to change. Tax the banks, rail against the banks, and they simply won’t care. The only thing that will hurt them is to supply the population with an alternative and cheap supply of money. That’ll be the end of three hundred years of effective rule by the banking community. Are we hearing anything at all about any of this from our proposed leaders? Not a word. Irrelevant, all of them. Client politicians who will nicely provide the banks with client government in the same way when the Romans invaded the then Britons were provided with client kings. Punch and Judy politics? Not even that – just a puppet show.