There’s a great deal of confusion about the nature of money: what it actually is and how it works. I often hear people wax lyrical about the days of the gold standard, when the value of currency was tied to an agreed value of gold, in the belief that gold somehow keeps money honest. They…
Great article by John Aziz explaining why you can’t get a return on hoarded, idle, stagnant money during a recession. For an economy to thrive money has to be used to fund productive activities. Recession is caused by too much money rotting in bank accounts.
This article via Positive Money is gratifying. Looks like Frederick Snoddy came to similar conclusions as myself back in the 1920s. Especially that one of our biggest mistakes is to pretend that money = wealth. The article is also good on the utter failure of orthodox economics.
This article by Tim Harford in the Financial Times tells us that the gap between rich and poor has grown significantly over the last few decades, and suggests that the trend is self-perpetuating: the bigger the gap the easier it is for the rich few to become richer and fewer. Tim reckons that the free…
A nice clear summary from Positive Money of why the reported economic recovery is an illusion, and why we will suffer from ever-increasing debt until we change the way that money is created and used.
In a previous article about Scottish independence I pointed out that the only definite outcome from a “yes” vote in next year’s referendum will be a negotiation to disentangle the political and bureaucratic ties between Scotland and the rest of the UK. Beyond that no-one knows what an independent Scotland will actually look like or…
Here’s a very clear, easy to read analysis of the utter failure of the UK government’s current economic policy. Demonstrating, by the way, that economists are perfectly capable of talking sense in language that we can understand (thanks Ann Pettifor and Jeremy Smith).
A studiously thoughtful article from Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph about the ideological battle between followers of Keynes, Hayek, and Friedman, all of whom have been proved wrong in one way or another. When will the debate move on from dead men’s flawed theories to something pragmatic that might actually solve our problems?
Over the last couple of years I have come to the conclusion that economics, as it is taught and practised by most academics, is a load of nonsense. This article by Canadian professor Nick Rowe, in which he argues that “saving” should be abolished, is a classic example of taking an interesting idea and strangling…
I’m very harsh on economists in my book but here’s some good stuff from Bill Black at Naked Capitalism, proving that there are some diamonds amongst the dross.
Views From The Boatshed 