……and even probably many of us all and perhaps of some of society in general…Christine Desan in discussing her book said she initially “majored in religion and sociology of religion”. The book itself ‘Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism’ is unfortunately expensive to buy but at least it is cheaper as a… Read more
Category:
Money
Promissory notes, Treasury notes and Bank notes
In Felix Martin’s Book ‘Money the Unauthorised Biography’ he quotes this wonderful fact: In 1702, just six years after the foundation of the Bank of England, in Clarke v, Martin, the Chief Justice described the still very new ‘promissory notes’ as ‘a new sort of specialty unknown to the Common Law’ and ‘invented in Lombard… Read more
Does Wörgl show us how to arrest the demand for continual growth?
It was Steve Keen who (for me) pointed out that of the three uses of money viz: a unit of account, a means of payment and a store of value, the last two are in conflict. He commented on the the inbuilt depreciation of the Wörgl local currency in that it expired by 1% monthly… Read more
‘Money we owe to ourselves’
It appears that a Financial Times survey found investors believe the central bank’s quantitative easing programme is a thinly veiled attempt to finance the government’s deficit to keep its borrowing costs down. They seem to feel they’ve been ‘had’. The City would much rather government borrowing costs went up of course, but charts like this… Read more
The money tree is not magic but real
We used to think, with good reason, that globalization had defanged national governments. Presidents cowered before the bond markets. Prime ministers ignored their country’s poor but never Standard & Poor’s. Finance ministers behaved like Goldman Sachs’s knaves and the International Monetary Fund’s satraps. So commences this excellent piece from Yanis Varousakis (well worth reading in… Read more
Further evidence of spend and tax
In the continuing journey of trying to understand money it seems to me we are now up to eight reasons as to why we never tax and spend, but always spend first (all reasons except the fourth are linked): 1.Logic 2.Fiat currencies are, by definition, a government monopoly 3.All money is an IOU: the (government… Read more
Why Turing for Erasmus?
At the beginning of the year, Johnson maintained that leaving the EU was no threat to the Erasmus scheme: Now he seems to have implied it is too expensive, though when even somewhere like Afghanistan can be an associate member, I don’t think he is telling the truth. Additionally, earlier this year a Guardian report… Read more
Loaves and fishes
After Smugg Mogg belittled the efforts of Unicef to feed Britain’s hungry children (one cogent comment I saw was ‘Tough on Unicef but not tough on the causes of Unicef’) it has emerged that their expenditure was in fact £700,000: This is an indictment of not only Mogg himself but also the UK government, who… Read more
Review of ‘The Magic Money Forest’
The much hyped – at least by the BBC – ‘Magic Money Forest’ on Radio 4 was much as most of us cynics expected. The presenter originally worked for the HSBC bank as an economist and is now a BBC economics correspondent. So although she mentioned MMT it was first as the ‘Magic Money Tree’… Read more
Social infrastructure is also vital to any recovery plan
This is a letter to the FT from the Progressive Economy Forum (an outfit that our esteemed benefactor, Richard Murphy, has been expelled from – simply because he doesn’t think Quantitative Easing will ever be paid back. Time has actually already told – it’s 12 years and counting that it has not…) UK chancellor Rishi… Read more