I feel sorry for people who have money tied up in poorly-performing financial products from which they can’t escape, but I have no patience with the likes of this lot – saveoursavers.co.uk – who seem to think that they have a God-given right to an income from money that’s lying idle in a bank account.…
With the referendum on Scottish independence a little more than a year away the debate remains depressingly shallow. The “Yes Scotland” campaign presents us with a wishlist of policies and outcomes that it would like to come to pass in an independent Scotland without acknowledging that the only certain outcomes from the referendum will be…
This article on the BBC News website tells us that the US Treasury expects to reach the “debt ceiling” sometime in October. The debt ceiling is an arbitrary amount of federal government borrowing that Congress has decided cannot be exceeded. It’s a bit like an overdraft limit for the nation. The limit has been imposed…
Rory Bremner’s One Question Quiz on Radio 4 this evening asked Where Did All The Money Go? Most of it was predictable comedy that skimmed the surface of our financial dysfunction, but they did tell us loud and clear that banks create most of our money when issuing loans, which was unexpectedly accurate. More disappointing…
Here’s an illuminating post from Andy Wightman on media reports of booming prices for farmland. The detail is worth reading as it exposes the “news” as nothing more than market-boosting propaganda by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, whose members live off fees from property sales. A call to journalists: if you’re too lazy/incompetent to…
Merryn Somerset-Webb at Money Week making some good points about the (probable) wasted opportunity of Scottish Independence.
The UK government has been very successful at promoting the idea that our system of welfare benefits is at the mercy of legions of scroungers who are cheating the taxpayer out of vast sums of money and thereby contributing significantly to the annual deficit. The resulting “benefits rage” provides a very effective smokescreen, helping to…
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.
Views From The Boatshed 