I have a friendly electrician who is married to a Scot and who is a rampant Brexiter. He thinks Scotland is nuts to want to sacrifice a 300 year, or rather longer, association with the rest of Britain, in favour of the EU. He has a point. Getting out of the EU after 45 years… Read more
Category:
Money
Harnessing the power of the Post Office
I’m well aware of the alleged recent increase in wealth but it seems to be overwhelmingly and generally concentrated only in the top 1%. Yet with the recent demise of another payday lender, QuickQuid, shouldn’t we be trying to increase the power of all that 99% of the poor? Of course to suggest that wealth… Read more
Libra is not so free
It seems that Facebook’s intentions have been unwittingly exposed in this article. Zuckerberg cautioned that the U.S. might lose its “financial leadership” on the world stage if Libra is not allowed to launch, noting that “China is moving quickly to launch similar ideas in the coming months.” Of course China – or at least its government… Read more
Capitalism’s indebted dynamism
Paul Mason has an interesting article in the New Statesman, which starts: In his own dumb way, Matt Hancock just summed up the survival strategy for global capitalism. Blinking into the camera lights, Britain’s hapless Health Secretary assured viewers that he could promise to build 40 new hospitals with just £100m because “the rest of the… Read more
Rohan Grey’s ‘Banking Under Digital Fiat Currency’ Proposal – A Guest post by Richard Taylor
Rohan Grey, president of the US MMT supporting Modern Money Network, recently wrote a rather good article about why Facebook’s putative Libra currency is a bad idea. In it he links to some proposals for future banking regulation. In my view these proposals for “Banking in a Digital Fiat Currency Regime” are really interesting and… Read more
Tax and spend? Not with Johnson…
BBC Radio Four news has tonight reported that we will be told how Johnson’s spending commitments will be paid for in due course. Isn’t this ‘real’ evidence of spend, and tax? And, if so it’s most unfortunate that Johnson got there before Labour……. Read more
Understanding monetary ‘plumbing’ and where it gets us
There is an interesting podcast from the American site Macro’n Cheese with the Scottish Professor Mark Blyth, who, though he long ago emigrated and has become Eastman Professor of Political Economy at Brown University in the US, he has certainly managed to hang to most of his Dundonian dialect! I have to say I usually… Read more
Is Interest the Opiate of the Masses?
This is the title of an interesting article examining alternatives to interest bearing debt including Islamic finance. Now, looking at the website on which the article appears, I must emphasise that I am not of any religious persuasion and I’d be wary when it gives voice to some rather dubious – to me anyway –… Read more
Swiss ‘vollgeld’ referendum seems to have been as much a fraud as Brexit
I understand that Positive Money’s (PoMo) replacement book on ‘Modernising Money’ has been cancelled and that they are refocussing in favour of research and shorter campaigns such as that which endeavours to stop further sell-off of the Royal Bank of Scotland and others like the report as to how and why the Bank of England… Read more
The Wörgl Experiment
I discovered this short video on the Austrian Wörgl Experiment, by Hollis Doherty, who is as may be too apparent, an actress, and also a writer. She has apparently written the screenplay for a film, “The Miracle in Wörgl”, though, unfortunately, I can’t find evidence of it having been actually made. Still it describes well an… Read more