To continue on from yesterday’s blog about where people think money comes from and how it is created, now people realise that the era when money rested on the value of gold has long past, so most, these days, seem to consider that money comes from tax. After all everyone ‘knows’ that there is no… Read more
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Peter May
MMT is real gold
The misleading title is because one reader has suggested (thank you, Damien) that I might respond to an ‘Economist’ article on MMT (Modern Monetary Theory). Which seems to go under various headings ‘Magic or logic?’ ‘Nutty or essential?’ depending on which Economist edition you are reading. Remarkably, it summarises MMT fairly well, whilst pointing out… Read more
Poles
The title is purposely ambiguous because I feared this would be a rant about ‘The Poles’ as in Polish people, (one of whom particularly is a friend)! In fact I’d written to my local councillor about telegraph poles – she replied with this succinct title. I discovered that BT is actually allowed to put up… Read more
Collage for Farage
Based on “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by the Proclaimers. From JOE.co.uk… Read more
The Iron Triangle
There is a very interesting idea from someone who blogs as the Naked Mole Rat entitled Brexit cannot break the Iron Triangle. I confess I’d never heard of the Iron Triangle (although it has a Wikipedia entry) but it seems I’m not alone. I confused it for the old sales concept that a company’s offer… Read more
Less likely to be imprisoned in Victorian times than today
An intriguing but rather depressing item on education and prisoners has appeared….. We mostly probably know that today about half of our prisoners are functionally illiterate. According to this linked ‘Guardian’ article: half of the 85,000 people currently incarcerated have a reading age of 11 or lower – with 20% falling well short of that… Read more
Money is abstract not physical
There is an interesting piece from Joanna Montgomerie of King’s College London, on Storytelling about Debt in which she calls out the: …£1.64 trillion of private debt [86% of GDP]. This enormous stock of debt must be fed a steady stream of present-day income, flowing from households… and she shows that this private debt is almost… Read more
Thinking like China
There is a very interesting piece in the FT about China building a road in Montenegro, to link the Adriatic port of Bar to Serbia’s capital Belgrade. The Montenegrin government’s borrowing from China to finance the road’s cost, estimated at €1.3bn, has sent the country’s debt soaring from 63 per cent of gross domestic product… Read more
Your country needs me
As we now know that English is pretty much the lingua franca (a good – imported – English phrase!) of the EU we also know that they have a deep understanding of (the idiocies of) current British politics. We are negotiating with ourselves in full sight of our fellow negotiators. It is some evidence of… Read more
Universal Basic Services (UBS) and also UBI?
There is a very interesting article ‘Can we have UBS and UBI?’ on what appears to be a new site devoted to Universal Basic Services (UBS). UBI is of course Universal Basic Income. It says: When we think about how to transition to a 21st century future that will deliver a larger life for the… Read more