And Positive Money doing its educational best: Am I alone in thinking that if the BBC cannot properly train their reporters they should at least be preventing them from speaking on things they clearly know nothing about?… Read more
Category:
Economics
Economics Theory
Austerity’s Two Parents
This was an incisive post from B. Gray, which I thought deserved much more attention: It follows: Austerity has two parents: greed and fear, both of which are powerful motivators among the wealthy elites and the politicians that do their bidding. Greed: Austerity promotes privatization of public services and assets, and increased private debt, all… Read more
Sunak’s day – again
While much of his personal life has been covered in Tatler (where else?), I thought this was an informative article on Sunak who appears to be a banker to his fingertips. He seems to be a natural austerian – for everyone but himself, naturally. The piece suggests that he is much more ‘conservative’ – fiscally… Read more
Fiat Money Facts.. continued
If proof were needed that we need to adopt – rather than MMT, actual ‘Fiat Money Facts’ we have it from the Treasury Select Committee. About three quarters of the way through the session there are questions from Steve Baker MP, Brexiter and Tory, no less. Remarkably he asks about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). He… Read more
Fiat Money Facts
This seems to me a much better shorthand description of the monetary system than Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). OK it clearly doesn’t include the add-ons such as a Job Guarantee but the Job Guarantee is an unwelcome distraction in my opinion – what we need is simply a consistent endeavour to achieve full employment. But… Read more
REWIRING THE BANKING AND MONETARY SYSTEM – by Jim Osborne
In his masterpiece of a book “Debt- the First 5000 Years”, David Graeber concludes in the final chapters with what is a prediction and a challenge. The prediction is that we are at the early stage of a new age in the history of debt and money which is likely to last 500 or 600… Read more
FT news on handbag economics
This FT article ‘Sunak faces worst hit to UK finances since second world war’ is worth reading – not so much because it indicates that Sunak has got pretty much everything wrong about money that it is possible to get wrong but also because these misunderstandings have lead him to think the rich have to… Read more
Health is made at home, hospitals are for repairs
Is the wonderful title of an article, concerning his own book, in the ‘New Local’ by Nigel Crisp former CEO of the NHS, and now a crossbench peer. He says: I argue in the book that we need to think about health differently and recognise that health creation plays an important role alongside health services… Read more
Victims of the “the overwhelming might of the state”
This is a quote from Rishi Sunak, who is profiled in ‘Tatler’, which although I feel sure absolutely all our readers subscribe to, I will offer the link nonetheless. When your Chancellor is in ‘Tatler’ you have to realise that he has arrived – even if none of the rest of us has. (The article… Read more
Charities are just another unequal tax
When I discovered that last night’s ‘Children in Need’ television programme had been going for forty years it led me to think about charity. This is really a version of the very Victorian concept of ‘the poor will always be with us’ – because after four decades we still have children in need. So foggy… Read more