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.
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?
This short video from Positive Money explains why the rich get richer and the rest of us get deeper in debt. There’s a lot of stuff on their website that’s worth investigating if you’re interested in understanding how our economy got into such a mess.
Views From The Boatshed 