There is rather an interesting article in the London ‘Evening Standard’. I know it is now highly suspect as a source – and additionally of course, it is nominally at least, edited by George Osborne. This piece however, is really opinion and I think it is actually opinion worth considering. It certainly has a bearing… Read more
Category:
Economics
Economics Theory
Has the ‘Guardian’ got it?
This must be the first ‘Guardian’ editorial to quote Prof Stephanie Kelton – and the first one for a long time to suggest that deficit financing is a good idea. Before spending more money on the NHS, British politicians should take the advice of the US economist Stephanie Kelton: in a UK lecture this week,… Read more
Job Guarantee or Income Guarantee – which to prefer?
This is the happiness U shape of life satisfaction, which doesn’t suggest many of us are that happy at all. But it does suggest that we are least happy when we are supposed to be ‘earning’, rather than just ‘kept’. I wonder whether this means that the Job Guarantee (JG) would therefore just be… Read more
Money for nothing is everything
There is an excellent summary in one easy blog on TRUK of Modern Monetary Theory* (MMT), which should more properly be called Modern Monetary Practice or the Modern Monetary System (MMS). As usual, below the article are the comments, many of which are highly critical, usually on the basis that if you are stupid enough… Read more
“The UK’s bargaining power, with A50 untriggered, would have been much greater.”
The title is a quote from a recent Simon Wren Lewis blog on the disastrous Brexit performance of our current, so called government. I’ve always maintained that Theresa May is easily the worst Prime Minister since the Second World War. I’m, in an odd way, reassured that Simon Wren Lewis has written an excoriating article… Read more
Are we the Moneytreeists?
Having recently attended an exhibition on suffragettes I was struck by the fact that the name which we all now recognise was, it transpires, coined by none other than the ‘Daily Mail’ as a derogatory term for the suffragists. That set me thinking on what we could call those who understand money is a social… Read more
Even when government borrows money it still creates it
At least that is what I’ve always thought. So it was good that I’ve encountered some systematic reasoning on the subject, (but it’s drawn from diverse twitter replies so cannot be properly linked). When the government “borrows”, they give money to somebody, because they, the government, alone create it, and simply decide that, rather than… Read more
Burning tallies – and what bankers have forgotten
I mentioned the burning down of Parliament in my earlier post on a federal Britain. Famously it took place to general approval of the rubbernecking public. As Thomas Carlyle put it, “A man sorry I did not anywhere see.” I doubt it would be different now – although JMW Turner’s painting would doubtless be replaced… Read more
Has the time come for a Federal Britain?
Blair gave independence referendums to two countries of the UK and began to do the same with the regions – crucially without suggesting the actual overall system. Scotland and Wales got their devolution whereas England, in the end, did not. It is very typical of the piecemeal approach of, what the French call ‘Anglo Saxon’… Read more
On trade deficits: MMT is not MMT enough
As a postscipt to my previous piece, there is futher comment using this title as a paragraph heading from Steve Keen who has pretty comprehensively rebutted the MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) view that exports are a cost and imports are a benefit – in so doing it shows again the dangers of viewing the overall… Read more