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…
I have been self-employed for the best part of 30 years. If I’m not doing something that a client has agreed to be invoiced for, then I don’t get paid. That’s a whole working life on zero hours contracts, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I can pick and choose who I work…
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.
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.
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).
Views From The Boatshed 