From our Whitley Bay office ...
(For earlier entries, see Archives)
Thursday, 16 July, 2009
Meet the man who has exposed the great climate change con trick
The Spectator
James Delingpole talks to Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist, whose new book shows that 'anthropogenic global warming' is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a 'first-world luxury' with no basis in scientific fact. Shame on the publishers who rejected the book.
Reading Plimer’s Heaven And Earth is at
once an enlightening and terrifying experience. Enlightening because, after 500
pages of heavily annotated prose (the fruit of five years’ research), you are
left in no doubt that man’s contribution to the thing they now call ‘climate
change’ was, is and probably always will be negligible. Terrifying, because you
cannot but be appalled by how much money has been wasted, how much unnecessary
regulation drafted because of a ‘problem’ that doesn’t actually exist. (South
Park, as so often, was probably the first to point this out in a memorable
episode where Al Gore turns up to warn the school kids about a terrible beast,
looking a bit like the Gruffalo, known as ManBearPig.)
Has it come in time to save the day, though? If there’s any justice, Heaven And Earth will do for the cause of climate change realism what Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change alarmism. But as Plimer well knows, there is now a powerful and very extensive body of vested interests up against him: governments like President Obama’s, which intend to use ‘global warming’ as an excuse for greater taxation, regulation and protectionism; energy companies and investors who stand to make a fortune from scams like carbon trading; charitable bodies like Greenpeace which depend for their funding on public anxiety; environmental correspondents who need constantly to talk up the threat to justify their jobs.
Read the article here:
Whose Money? says:
So what has this to do with money reform?
Well, not only do governments "intend to use ‘global warming’ as an excuse for greater taxation, regulation and protectionism", while giant transnational corporations make a killing in profits, and politically correct NGOs rake in millions in funding.
On top of all that, it's likely that
environmental panic is being used to inflate the next bubble, keeping the
debt-based financial system hanging on long past its sell-by date, and
eventually bankrupting another generation of naive investors.
Buy this book, talk about it, and pass it around. Your children and grandchildren are being pumped full
of unopposed alarmist propaganda in their 'geography' lessons, in their
'science' lessons - even in the selection of themes for their 'French' lessons!
If the government refuse
to outlaw political indoctrination in the classroom (and man-made climate change is being used to impose far-reaching political change), it's up to us to make sure
the rising generation hears all the evidence.
You can order the hardback edition of Heaven and Earth by Ian Plimer from Amazon, here:
Meanwhile, Ellen Brown continues to repeat the obvious truth to (we hope!) increasingly interested readers in the States:
Toward a Solution to the Debt Crisis in California: The State Could Walk Away and Create Its Own Credit Machine
Op Ed News
Four Wall Street banks, which received $15-25 billion each from the taxpayers, have rejected California's IOUs because the State is supposedly a bad credit risk. The bailed out banks would seem to have a duty to lend a helping hand, but they say they don't want to delay an agreement on further austerity measures. State legislators are not bowing quickly to the pressure, but what is the alternative?
In the latest twist to the California budget saga, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase (which each got $25 billion in bailout money from the taxpayers) and Bank of America (which got $15 billion) have refused California's request for a loan to tide it over until October. Until the State can get things sorted out, it has started paying its creditors in IOUs ("I Owe You's" or promises to pay bearing interest, technically called registered warrants). Its Wall Street creditors, however, have refused to take them. Why? The pot says the kettle is a poor credit risk!
Read more ...
http://www.opednews.com/articles/From-Sunshine-State-to-Sub-by-Ellen-Brown-090713-321.html
Whose Money? says:
Time to impose a few austerity measures on the banks.
And not just in relation to top bankers' bonuses!
Time to take away from them the privilege of creating the whole of the nation's non-cash money supply for their own profit, and at our ever-increasing risk and expense.
As Ellen points out, banks maintain this unmerited privilege because we have been led to believe that they are uniquely able to create the non-cash money which now forms 97% of our total money supply.
And as she also untiringly points out, (see her book, The Web of Debt, http://www.webofdebt.com/order.php, this belief is absurd.
If banks can effectively create non-cash money as loans by grace and favour of the nations whose real wealth backs all money, both cash and non-cash, there is absolutely no reason why those nations should not withdraw their grace and favour, and assume the right to create their means of exchange for themselves - not as a debt, but as tokens of existing value.
There may well be a place for
publicly-owned banks both as an emergency measure in the present crisis, and
permanently, as part of a varied economy.
All the same, our priority must be to nationalise money itself: for if loans could be
advanced only from an existing money stock created by public authority, private
lenders of 'credit' (ie, debt) would be deprived of their present power to fuel
inflation via a succession of asset-price bubbles, leading to repeated cycles of boom and bust.
Wednesday, 15 July, 2009
Worst unemployment rate for 14 years as record job losses see it soar to 2.38million
The Daily Mail
Unemployment has soared to almost 2.4 million after a record number of people joined the growing jobless ranks, grim new figures showed today.
The figure rose by 281,000 in the three months to May, the biggest quarterly increase on record, taking the total to 2.38 million, the highest since 1995.
Read more ...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1199773/Record-rise-sees-unemployment-soar-2-38mn.html
Whose Money? says:
We note gloomily the hope of establishing a "less precarious tax base with a financial services sector that supports the wider economy".
The financial services sector should not support the wider - ie, the real, productive - economy. Our aim should be to regenerate the real, productive economy, which would then have the strength to support a much-slimmed-down financial services sector.
Focussing on unemployment as a problem to be solved only leads to malinvestment. The problem is not unemployment. The problem is that we have been led to believe that the purpose of an economy is 1) to produce money; and 2) to produce jobs.
The purpose of an economy is neither to
produce money, nor to produce jobs. The purpose of an economy is to produce the
goods and services that human beings need, initially to survive, and subsequently to enjoy
life.
Our primary objective, then, should be to
forget about exporting wealth in return for money, and to start producing more real goods for the domestic
market: in particular, to expand agriculture, and to reclaim our fisheries, so
that we are reasonably self-sufficient in food.
This would, of course, involve repeal of the 1972 European Communities Act - as would the deliberate promotion of home-based manufacturing and heavy industry.
All of this would be possible if we had a supportive, nationalised, debt-free currency, rather than allowing our wealth to be drained and ultimately destroyed by a parasitical, debt-generating, profiteering financial sector.
It is also instructive to ask whether, in fact, we need to rely on full employment in order to distribute incomes in an age of increasing automation.
In the fifties and sixties of the last
century we were repeatedly hearing about the "problem of leisure", as machines
took over.
Yet, absurdly, at the very time when jobs were predicted to fall
into shorter supply, more and more women were being encouraged into the
paid-employment market, both by the contempt of women's libbers, who
denounced stay-at-home 
wives and mothers as "kept women", and by the eagerness
of banks to offer larger and larger mortgages on the basis of two incomes. With
the advent of the two-wage-earner family, an additional debt industry, unrelated to home ownership, also took
off, as credit cards proliferated, luring previously thrifty people deeper and
deeper into the red.
Throw in mounting inflation, and an economy riddled with taxes at every level, and the result is that families are now struggling to get by on two wage packets, when in the past they could manage adequately on one - with a little extra provided by the wife taking on a part-time work when the children were off her hands.
We don't have anything against women being the breadwinners (though we do object very strongly to either men or women who work unpaid in the home for the love of their families being dismissed as useless parasites): but to effectively double the number of job applicants when automation is progressively reducing the number of well-paid jobs available simply makes no sense.
As genuinely necessary or productive jobs
are wiped out by automation, and by competition from cheap overseas or imported
labour, work which actually pays a living wage has become hard to find,
particularly for young men. You rarely saw men behind the till in a
supermarket, for instance, thirty years ago: they hadn't yet realised that the kind of jobs they'd been brought up to expect were rapidly being eliminated or transferred overseas.
with which our rulers create
useless, or even counter-productive, bureaucratic and regulatory jobs at the
taxpayer's expenNaturally it's in the government's
interest to have as many people as possible in paid employment, since, with both
the tax threshhold and National Insurance well up, this swells the Chancellor's
coffers and boosts GDP - hence the enthusiasm with which our rulers create
useless, or even counter-productive, bureaucratic and regulatory jobs at the
taxpayer's expense.
It is not, however, in the interest of families,
particularly when children are still young, to have nobody taking full-time
responsibility on the domestic front.
One full-time wage-earner per family - whether male or female, it makes no odds - or two working part-time outside the home would be better not only for family life, but for an employment market which can no longer reasonably absorb all the job-seekers available.
There is clearly no solution to the "unemployment problem", as long as we continue to rely on a dwindling number of productive wage packets to support not only a huge state sector but a swelling demand for welfare payments of every kind.
Why not slash the bureaucracy and cut
taxes with publicly-created money and a non-means-tested national dividend for
all adult 
citizens? This would provide a platform from which job-sharing and
part-time work would become a feasible proposition for the majority - especially if we
reclaimed the right to make our own laws, kicked the export habit*, and started
to produce and manufacture as much as possible at home, for the domestic
market.
* By importing and exporting only surpluses and specialised goods.
Miliband promises more green jobs but Vestas wind turbine plant is closing
Ben Webster, The
TimesOne of Britain’s biggest employers in the green energy industry is to cease production within hours of a government announcement today pledging as many as 400,000 green jobs by 2015.
Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, will claim that Britain will become a world leader in low-carbon technology and manufacturing. He will argue that raising household energy bills to pay for investment in wind, solar and tidal power is justified not only by the dangers of global warming but also the opportunity to build a new “green economy”.
Read more ...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6710815.ece
Whose Money? says:
So the price of more jobs (not to mention
inflation of the next money-manufacturing bubble (see entries for Saturday and
Monday) is to be even less disposable income for ordinary families!
And all for a renewable that can't hope to bridge the gap between what we need and what it's capable of producing - not to mention the fact that it has to be backed up 24/7 by conventional power stations!
Why isn't the investment going into original technologies such as cold fusion - still being developed in, among other places, India and Japan, despite vigorous attempts by the scientific establishment to nip it in the bud (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R823CkmKzDY; http://www.infinite-energy.com/)?
Equally important: why isn't the money being invested created debt-free on behalf of the nation, instead of borrowed into existence, at the nation's risk and expense, from the private commercial banking system?
Tuesday, 14 July, 2009
Like Mr Micawber, Britain finds itself
in a 
debtors' prison
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
So says the Micawber Principle, after the character in Dickens’ David Copperfield.
Rarely has it seemed more apposite. Mr Micawber ended up in a debtors’ prison. The UK economy is arguably already in it. The long, credit-fuelled boom is over, leaving Britons with mountainous debt which will take years to work off. To that must now be added burgeoning public debt.Read more ...
Whose Money? says:Oh dear! Yet another piece of cud-chewing over the cut-public-spending/raise-taxes dilemma!
When governments create money, what do
they do? You know, they don't create any purchasing power when they create
money. ... Where new purchasing power comes from is production. The only way
we can buy more is if we make more. If we just print more, we can't buy any
more, all that means is that we have to pay more for what we do buy ... People
make the assumption that the problem is a lack of money, we don't have enough
money, and if we just had more money we could go spend it. No, it's not that we
don't have the money, we don't have the stuff.
So is the answer to go back on the gold
standard?On this subject we disagree profoundly with Mr Schiff. In the past the gold standard has led to mass deprivation, owing to, among other things, hoarding and manipulation. Instead, we need to find some other way of ensuring that the money supply adequately supports the trade of all goods and services in existence; but - equally important - that it is not allowed to expand through speculative, rather than productive, activity.
Monday, 13 July, 2009
Make your home greener or pay higher 
council tax, Government
says
Householders should face higher council tax and stamp duty if they refuse to make their homes greener, Government advisers say.
Those who do not have double glazing or insulation would be hammered under proposals drawn up by an environmental pressure group which will be considered by ministers.
They want the punishments to be brought in alongside 'green mortgages', under which homeowners can apply for loans to spend on energy-efficient equipment such as new boilers and even solar panels.
Whose Money? says:As we have seen recently, gas and electricity companies - now firmly in the grasp of huge transnational conglomerates - are far quicker off the mark at raising their charges, on the first pretext, than at lowering them proportionately, when that original pretext evaporates.
Pensions experts predict 'horrific news' on funds
Jonathan Sibun, The Sunday TelegraphFor Adam Crozier, things could be about to get a lot worse. The chief executive of Royal Mail saw 10,000 of his workers strike last week, but Britain's top postie knows that could be just the beginning.
While postal workers are up in arms about job cuts and working conditions, their anger could soon pale into insignificance under the cloud of a far greater threat. At stake for many of them is their future financial security. The postal giant is considering whether to close the company's retirement scheme to existing members, forcing them to join a new pension pot with less lucrative benefits.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
With a nationalised money supply, and a basic income for all adult citizens, pensions would go a lot further.
There is no way of ensuring a decent standard of living for working people, let alone for pensioners, under our present debt-based monetary system.
Scrap the use of systemic debt as money: then we'll have firm ground under our feet when deciding how best to distribute incomes in this age of automation.
Remember, gentlemen, Thatcher's cuts didn't actually work
It is often as important to know what not to do as to embark on a new course of action. Whenever there is a prospect of a new government, and people begin to ask "What are their new ideas?" I not only start counting the spoons, I also have an eye on the forks, not to say the knives.
Lately I have been especially worried by all these inspired
reports that Messrs Cameron and Osborne are deep into the study of how the
Thatcher team of 1979 approached government. It seems that for the Cameron
Conservatives, the big new idea is an old idea. After a brief flirtation with
Caring Conservatism, the emphasis is on cuts, cuts and more cuts. Meanwhile our
beleaguered prime minister is being attacked on all sides for resisting the cuts
that so many commentators regard as not only inevitable but also desirable.
...
... At a seminar earlier this year Dick Sargent, a distinguished former government and bank economist, put it well: "Some people think that the national debt is like a company debt, owed to people outside the company. But most of our national debt is owed to ourselves, ie to UK residents (individuals, pension funds, trusts, banks, charities and so on). Since the government has the power to raise taxes to pay the interest, there can never be a question of default ('the country going bankrupt', as the media like to say)."
Read more ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jul/12/conservative-cuts-margaret-thatcher
Whose Money? says:
As Mike Rowbotham pointed out in The Grip of Death, (order it here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Grip-Death-Slavery-Destructive-Economics/dp/1897766408 - and, by the way, it should have five full stars!) we do NOT
owe the national debt to ourselves, and for Dick Sargent to say that we do is
disingenuous. In particular, the banks and other financial institutions which
own a huge proportion of that debt are no longer UK companies run for the
benefit of UK citizens. They are transnationals whose loyalty is to their
owners and other shareholders, and their executives' salaries and bonuses will inevitably take precedence over the well-being of the nation.
What is more, the government's "power to raise taxes" to service the national debt is small consolation to those whose shrinking disposable incomes are to be squeezed further in order to maintain the very debt-based financial system which has ruined our real economy.
Once again, it is clear that there is no solution to the tax-and-spend/cut public services dilemma as long as we choose to create the bulk of our national currency (97% of all money in circulation) as a debt owed to the banking system.
As money reformers have always maintained, if a nation has sufficient backing
in real wealth to create the bonds 
which indebt it, it has sufficient backing
to create the equivalent of that borrowing in the form of stable money, owed to nobody, thus freeing itself at a stroke from bondage to the banks.
When we insist that our means of exchange and distribution should be created, rather than continuously borrowed into existence, we will finally have put in place the foundations of a productive economy, resistant not only to the extremes of private wealth and public squalor, but to remorseless, inflationary cycles of boom and bust.
New website on money reform:
Real Solutions to the Financial Crisis
Ben Dyson
With complete confidence I can say that our politicians,
economists, journalists and bankers have ‘missed the point’ as far as the crisis
is concerned. They have focused their energy and attention on the
symptoms of the problem, rather than the root cause. The
symptoms are reckless lending by banks. 
The root cause is that fact that
it is banks – and not the government – who actually create the vast majority of
money in our economy.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is fact, commonly accepted by economics textbooks and the banking regulators. What is not acknowledged is the devastating consequences of handing the nation’s printing press over to the banking sector – consequences that have led directly to the financial crisis of the last 2 years.
Here's the web address:
Whose Money? says:
Well worth book-marking - after all, like us, he came to understand how systemic debt works by reading a book that gets to the heart of the matter. To quote from the website section headed "About Ben Dyson":
"The words 'Grip of Death' caught my eye in the library
one day, and I had discovered the book that would explain why most
economic theories failed, and why governments were usually unsuccessful
in manipulating the economy. The book" (read the first chapter here) was Michael Rowbotham’s exposé on
the system on the shocking effects of money and debt creation at the
hands of the commercial banks."
Lots of information here: in particular, there are sections dealing with practical suggestions for reform.
Sunday, 12 July, 2009
Ban on 100% home loans dropped
Gaby Hinsliff, The
ObserverEarlier this year, Gordon Brown asked the Financial Services Authority, the government watchdog, to consider a ban on mortgages with a high loan-to-value (LTV) rate - such as those requiring deposits of less than 10% - and on so-called high-multiple mortgages, which allow buyers to borrow more than three or four times their income.
FSA executives told a parliamentary committee last week that such restraint could lock first-time buyers out of the market just as they were starting to regain confidence. Their warnings reflect a growing consensus in Whitehall that banning higher-risk mortgages may be counterproductive.
Read more ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/jul/12/ban-100-home-loans-dropped
Whose Money? says:
It certainly won't beneifit first-time
buyers to be given loans big enough to maintain the asking-price of over-valued
property.
The government isn't actually interested in making things easier for young couples. It's interested in propping up a failed financial system which depends on mass borrowing to put money into circulation.
Mortgages, as Mike Rowbotham pointed out before the turn of the century in his ground-breaking book, The Grip of Death (read the first chapter here), have recently taken over from business investment as the prime vehicle for this mass borrowing.
When will our "representatives" finally realise that there's no need for the real economy to suffer just because people aren't borrowing themselves to perdition? When will they finally admit that it's not necessary to borrow in order to have a money supply?
The potential for plenty is all around us. Why opt for financially-induced scarcity?
Letters to the Journal
Gillian Swanson
As an active member of the Keep Metro Public Community Campaign, I've recently been writing to the Newcastle Journal advocating the reversal of the government's present policy of putting the trains and services up for tender to all comers - including transnational giants.
The Journal has been very obliging in
publishing my letters.
However, while they are happy to print standard arguments against privatisation, they seem to be unwilling to venture into suggestions of changes in monetary policy which might solve the lack-of-public-finance argument underpinning the auction of public assets.
Yesterday, for instance, a letter from myself appeared with this passage deleted:
'If 
the government wants "best value", they should look to nationalising the money supply, to eliminate the cost of borrowing it into existence as a compound interest-bearing debt owed to the banking system. The costs of running the trains might also be significantly reduced if wages, salaries and pensions were part-paid in vouchers acceptable in payment of council tax and business rates (and therefore in shops, etc) throughout the area covered by Metro services.' (NB - Along the lines suggested by James Gibb Stuart, here: http://www.sustecweb.co.uk/past/sustec13-5/policy_proposal.htm.)
Of course, space on the letters page is at a premium, and this passage was a natural candidate for elimination, since the rest of the letter could stand quite well without it.
'The proposed Post Bank is a good idea. Perhaps it could even be run
along the lines of the Bank of North Dakota, which is mentioned by American
money-reformer Ellen Brown in a recent article in the Huffington Post, as "the
only state-owned bank in the nation." 
'The Bank of North Dakota, Ellen
says, "was established by the legislature in 1919 to free farmers and small
businessmen from the clutches of out-of-state bankers and railroad men. By law,
the state must deposit all its funds in the bank, and the state guarantees its
deposits. The bank's surplus profits are returned to the state's coffers."
'As a result of this financial public-service initiative, North Dakota,
one of only three states able to meet its budget, "is not only solvent but now
boasts the largest surplus it has ever had".
'In conjunction with our
own publicly-owned bank we should, of course, also nationalise the actual money
supply. This could be done by making it as illegal for commercial banks to
create new non-cash money in the form of credit (ie, debt) as it already is for
them to print notes or mint coins; and by legislating for a public authority
along the lines of the Monetary Policy Committee to issue our national currency,
both cash and non-cash, in line with the real wealth of the nation, and free of
any debt at source.
'Local and regional currencies could also play a very
necessary part in reviving the fortunes of the north-east of
England.'
In the past the Journal has been very generous in printing both letters and columns critical of our present debt-based economy.
Is it now official policy to avoid this subject - just at a time when it has become glaringly relevant?
Saturday, 11 July, 2009
Grainne Gilmore, The TimesFactory gate prices fell by a bigger-than-expected 1.2 per cent in the year to June — four times larger than the 0.3 per cent decline recorded for May and the sharpest decline since the end of 2001, as manufacturers battled dwindling demand.
Read more ...
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article6680552.ece
Whose Money? says:
Unfortunately, it's only too likely that, while factory-gate prices fall,
taxation - which permeates every level of production and distribution - will
rise, pushing up inflation, as our cash-strapped government struggles to service its debts.We have the labour, we have the materials, we'd even have the potential to discover new sources of cheap, clean energy ... if investment were not being poured into the wrong projects.
Paul Farrow, The Daily Telegraph
We were told that house prices started to fall officially in late 2007, but
the reality for people who bought new builds is altogether different. Their
house price crash began as long ago as early 2006.
A property based in East Anglia, which was valued at £246,995 in April 2006 would be worth around £225,000 today, a fall of 9pc, according to the Nationwide House Price Index calculator on its website. But the house price index does not differentiate between a new-build property or one that is, say, 150 years old. In reality that property could be worth just £120,000.
I say reality because that is the case with flat number 7 Henry Laver Court, Colchester, which was bought for a princely sum of £246,995 in the Spring of 2006 only to be sold for £120,000 less than that three years later. It is not the only flat in the three-year old development that has fallen in value by as good as 50pc.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
As Mervyn King pointed out, some time ago now: "House prices are a matter of opinion. Debt is real."
Lyubov Pronina,
Bloomberg
We've seen with the euro, and
even with national currencies like the pound, cannot serve those who use them efficiently without massive centralised redistribution of funding. Optimal currency areas are, by their very nature, small: and the tax-based transfers of money involved when a common currnecy covers widely disparate areas invariably cause resentment, even within an (until recently, at any rate) cohesive nation such as the UK.
Worse, those transfers are usually unsuccessful, if success is to be measured by improved economic activity and self-sufficiency in regions receiving subsidies.
Instead, debt-free national currencies should be the basic
building blocks of the financial system, with local and regional currencies
fostering grass-roots autonomy and more even economic development. In addition, a neutral, value-based trading
currency would be needed to facilitate the co-operative exchange of surpluses and specialised
goods among the nations of the world.
Professor John Kozy, Global ResearchFriday, 10 July, 2009
New video from Paul Grignon!Remember Paul Grignon's animation, Money as Debt?
These criticisms are answered in Grignon's latest DVD,
Money As Debt II
For this, and much more, order the complete set of Money As
Debt videos here:
The Renegade EconomistGlobally recognised expert in coaching and leadership Sir John Whitmore addresses the shift in thinking that is necessary around society’s relationship with the economy to create a sustainable future. The short term thinking of politicians means the opportunity for change is currently being missed.
We ask Sir John if this propping up of an old system will inevitably lead to a greater crisis further down the line.
Watch the video here:
http://renegadeeconomist.com/headline/6-minutes-sir-john-whitmore.html
Whose Money? says:
With little new happening on the financial front, as we settle into long-term stagflation, here's another reminder that what's necessary, if we are to enjoy an abundant life-style, instead of profligate spending with little real satisfaction, is to put money in its proper place, as a mere facilitator of production, trade and distribution, rather than as the prime objective of economic activity.
Sir John clearly understands, as so many environmentalists do not, that it is our dysfunctional monetary system, rather than universal human greed, which drives the engine of endless growth, leading to widespread waste and pollution.
Thursday, 9 July, 2009
Nationwide offers 125% mortgage
BBC NewsThe Nationwide Building Society has introduced a mortgage allowing borrowers to take loans worth 125% of the value of the home they are buying.
It will only be available to existing customers in negative equity who want to move house.
Negative equity means that the value of someone's home is less than the amount they owe on their mortgage.
Nationwide said the deal was a very "niche offer" and that not everyone in negative equity would qualify.
Read more ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8141584.stm
Whose Money? says:
With prices still likely to fall a further 20% or more?
Is this crazy, or what?
Finance white paper: Financial education
Alan Tovey, The Telegraph
"Faced by the events of the global financial crisis... consumers will need additional support and protection as they engage with providers of financial services to manage their day-to-day lives," the Government said in Wednesday's White Paper.
A new consumer education authority will be set up to raise the public's "financial capability" through a "national money guidance service". ...
... The Treasury estimated the total
cost of setting up and running the new body and advice programme will be between
£1.37bn and £2.7bn over 52 years.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
"Financial literacy" ? From the very people who supervised the present disaster?
We don't need instruction on how to
select "simple, transparent products" from a plethora of complicated, deceptive ones.
We need a transparent financial system, clear enough for basically numerate and literate people to understand without assistance: a financial system based on a means of exchange and distribution that is created free of debt at source, so that banks are unable to profiteer from abstruse money manipulation schemes, and the need to borrow is minimised.
Of course, that presupposes an educational system which produces basically literat and numerate people ...
Wednesday, 8 July, 2009
Prepare for the Dead Certainty: The Next Boom/Bust
We’ve seen how Barack Obama has failed to
change the rules governing America’s banks- it’s back to business-as-usual on
Wall Street. And now, Britain’s government is confessing failure. In its White
Paper on financial regulation, the Treasury reveals its unwillingness to
legislate. Instead it offers a raft of proposals for discussion.
Monetary policy, the regulatory agencies
concede, is insufficient to prevent asset price bubbles. So a second tool is
needed. But what should that be? Don’t ask the Treasury, because they don’t
know. If they did, we wouldn’t be enduring the worst economic crisis since the
Depression of the 1930s.
Read more ...
http://renegadeeconomist.com/blog/prepare-dead-certainty-boombust.html
Whose Money? says:
Fred Harrison is correct when he says that "the right questions have yet to be asked".
But we don't agree that a land tax would solve all our economic problems, since it is not only the land market that can be milked by financial speculators.
As we saw in the dot com bubble a few years back - and as people experienced at the time of tulip mania, in the seventeenth century - as long as it's possible for competing purchasers to bid prices up, bubbles will occur.
And usually the only way people can afford
to bid prices up way beyond any increase in real value is by
borrowing - the ability to borrow being dictated only by the amount available for lending.
If banks were restricted to lending money which actually existed, there would be insufficient money available to fund inflationary borrowing on the scale recently practised.
So yes, there should be an inquest: but focus should be on the way nations provide themselves with a money supply. That is the key to escaping from relentless cycles of boom and bust: tax reform in favour of productive enterprise can follow.
Tuesday, 7 July, 2009
GLOBAL VISION 2000 PRESS RELEASE
Global Vision 2000 and the Universal Peace Federation are
jointly organising a special emergency Parliamentary seminar to
examine the underlying causes of the financial and economic crisis and
the need for a fundamental paradigm shift to restore stability,
prosperity, justice and peace. It will take place in the House of
Lords, Committee Room 3 in Westminster, London on Monday July 13 2009
from 14.30- 1700. There will be a press conference held at College
Green from 1300 hours in Westminster for tv interviews with the
organisers and leading campaigners.This event is set to take place at a time when Parliament is at it's lowest ebb and it's image has been tarnished. This event is an affirmation by grassroot coalitions of the urgent need for civic society to champion the values of public service and the common good and reclaim Westminster as the people's shared political space.
Further to our last event in the Houses of Parliament on April 2
during the G20 London summit it is clear that there is a grand canyon
between those in officialdom who imagine green shoots of recovery and a
return to normality from the toll that the common man and ordinary
families are experiencing. Official sources claim that there will be a
rise in unemployment of 1 million in the UK in the next 12 months, 25
million in the OECD region and 50 million globally. The recovery appears to be a mirage and shadows of the 1930s are dawning. Bailouts and stimulus packages are targeting those who have created the crisis in the first place and there is papering over cracks and leaving intact the fundamental causes of instability. Furthermore the financial crisis has evolved into an economic crisis which is now manifesting as a full blown political crisis. The future is viewed with fear rather than hope and the hatred of the stranger stalks the land.
We are now seeing the rise of political extremism which threatens the peace and unity of the country. This is not surprising as the mainstream media and political elite are not addressing the real causes.
Furthermore whilst the UK is committed to Overseas development aid and Millenium Development Goals there is a need to review and redesign a fairer, just and sustainable global economic system that empowers the world's poorest billion to emerge from desperate poverty and facilitate global peace. The debate needs to move on from more of the same medicine with Global Capitalism 3.0 to a socially and ethically based paradigm and system.
The seminar will address the following issues:
Are we
witnessing a ‘L shaped’ Great Depression rather than a ‘V shaped
recession’? Do we need regulation, reform or revolution? How can
monetary, fiscal and economic justice advocates connect with the people
and political system? How can people power and national sovereignty be
secured against the global financial oligarchy? How can the UK deliver
on it's commitments on MDG? What does the City of London need to do to
be the leader in global finance? Is Islamic finance a Trojan horse or
Panacea? What type of paradigm shift is required?
Speakers include:-
Anne Belsey: Monetary Reform Party
Baron Junaid Bhatti of Ballencrieff: Islamic Finance Week
Canon Peter Challen: Chairman, Christian Council for Monetary Justice
Nick Dearden: President, Jubilee Debt Campaign / Put People First Alliance
Dr. Royston Flude: Cercle Mondial du Consensus
Kelvin Hopkins MP
Ian Parker-Joseph: Leader, Libertarian Party
Daud Pidcock: Global Vision 2000
David Triggs: Coalition for Economic Justice and Executive chair, Henry George Foundation
Dr.Adrian Wrigley: Systemic Fiscal Reform Group
Email: myaseen@globalvision2000.com; www.globalvision2000.com
Mobile 07818 082011
Global Vision 2000 is an independent international Islamic thinktank committed to the evolution of global human consciousness through the development of an Universal Paradigm.
Co-convenor: Robin Marsh, Secretary General, Universal Peace Federation UK
Mobile 07956210768/ 0207 563 0906
pa@uk.upf.org www.uk.upf.org
http://uk.youtube.com/PeaceDevelopmntNetwk
http://peacedevelopmentnetwork.wordpress.com
UPF is an NGO in Special Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations
Obamageddon
Gerald Celente on Fox NewsWhose Money? says:They need it because "optimism opiates" aren't the only alternative. There is also the possibility of admitting past errors and looking for a better way forward.
Dear Fellow Americans, and friends around the Earth,This 4th of July as we proudly celebrate our declaration of independence from the tyranny of a mad Brit King, lets remember the victory a small group of dedicated, courageous men and women achieved against the world's most powerful military of their time.
It was a victory that appeared extremely improbable at best, as they pledged their lives to fight for its success. And as events and battles were fought, the possibility of a favorable outcome grew even smaller. But at the right moment, help from France turned the tide and the British were defeated.
Defeated militarily, but not monetarily. For soon after the Constitution was ratified, in 1791 the 1st Bank of the United States, a privately owned and privately controlled central bank was put through Congress by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, modeled on the private Bank of England. The gang around that bank were more dangerous than King George the 3rd; and the Hamilton people thereby insinuated into the New World forces representing the most evolved secular form that evil had attained in the Old World. Thanks a lot Hamilton!
Jefferson fought the bank, helping to bring it down and Burr killed Hamilton over public insults; but privately issued money had gained a foothold in America. It's still here, in control of our monetary system. It's the root cause of most of our social and economic problems. Whenever it caused crises in the past, our government had to come to the rescue. It's latest atrocity is the current monetary, banking and economic crisis, threatening to take the entire world economy down into depression, and destroy the lives of billions of people in the process.
It must end now. This crisis gives us our only opportunity to reform our monetary system and eliminate the private creation of money; to eliminate the privilege banks have to create our money supply when they extend loans.
The American Monetary Institute has
published its research results in the book The Lost Science of Money (drawn from
a study of over 800 monetary books and sources). The first 23 chapters focus on
the monetary case studies from Aristotle forward. Then Chapter 24 summarizes
what those studies teach us and how that should be applied to solving today's
dilemma. The American Monetary Act puts that plan into legislative form. See
http://www.monetary.orgEach September (24th - 27th in 2009) we hold a monetary reform conference at Roosevelt University in Chicago where activists and advanced monetary researchers present talks and programs on monetary reform. There is a Discount ($295 instead of $395) for registrations mailed by July 15th. See the brochure now! http://www.monetary.org/2009conference.html
The American Monetary Act (http://www.monetary.org/amacolorpamphlet.pdf)is legislation which fundamentally reforms the private CREDIT/DEBT system now wrecking our nation, replacing it with a government MONEY system.
HOW: The Federal Reserve becomes
incorporated into the U.S. Treasury. Banks no longer have the accounting
privilege of creating our money supply. All their previously issued credit is
converted into U.S. Money through an elegant and gentle accounting change, which
has been described as brilliant by a former officer of the NY Fed. The banks are
held accountable for this conversion. New money is then introduced by the government spending it into circulation for infrastructure, starting with the $2.2 trillion the engineers tell us is needed to properly maintain our infrastructure over the next 5 years. Infrastructure will include the necessary human infrastructure of health care and education.
Banks are encouraged to continue lending as profit making companies, but are no longer allowed to create our money supply by loan making activity.
Thus, The American Monetary Act
nationalizes the money system, not the banking system. Banking is absolutely
not a proper function of government, but providing the nation’s money supply is
a key function of government. No one else can do it properly. Talk of
nationalizing the banking business may really act like a poison pill to block
real reform.
Despite prejudice against government, most people are surprised to learn that history shows government has a far superior record in controlling the money system than private controllers have. And yes that includes the continental currency, the Greenbacks and even the German Hyperinflation; which by the way took place under a completely privatized German central bank!
WHO: The American Monetary Institute, organized in 1996 as a publicly supported charitable trust, is the leading U.S. think tank on monetary history, theory and reform.
WHY: Because the crisis our present malformed banking and
money system has caused is crying out for reform, not merely regulation. It has
visibly brought the world economy to its knees; it has concentrated wealth to
unacceptable levels, and it now places the future development of humanity at
risk.
WHY? Considering the nature of modern weapons systems, leaving
the same people and families in power risks the survival of the species. Some of
them watching the past 16 years, must realize that. Lets hope they do the right
thing. But lets not depend on it!
I mentioned that the French played a key part at the start of
our nation. Today their gift to us of the Statue of Liberty still plays a
crucial role for us and for humanity. The liberty she symbolizes does not exist
in our nation. It never really has. The Statue has always been a symbol
encouraging us towards the possible. I love that statue and when I stayed in New
York, I often anchored my motor boat under it, and some of my fondest memories
are of those times as the sun set over New Jersey, still reflecting off the Twin
Towers; or anchored under the spectacular fireworks display there during the
bicentennial celebration.
Friends, we are all under pressure in this environment. Stress
will cause illness unless you act. Action will destroy fear! Good action towards
truth will change the world. Join with us to understand the nature of our money
system, how it should be structured and how we citizens can effect such change.
Thats what our country's founders would be doing now if they were of our time.
Thats what men and women of good will, can be doing now!
Well thats it for
now. Get in touch! Stay in Touch! Read the book. Come to the
conference!
HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!!
Stephen Zarlenga
AMI
http://www.monetary.org (free monetary CDs can be ordered there)
Photo of Statue of Liberty:
Whose Money? says:
Zarlenga writes, the Statue of Liberty "has always been a symbol
encouraging us towards the possible"(our emphasis).
We believe that, to make action successful, we must also be inspired with a vision of the world in which an ingrained, but mistaken, belief in scarcity has been replaced with confident expectation that there is plenty for all.
Debt-free money, issued in line with the production and maintenance of real wealth, will emerge as the natural corollary to this belief.
Monday, 6 July, 2009
'Let's use the Rock to save post offices'
Karen Dent, The Newcastle
JournalTHE campaign for a Post Bank was stepped up today with calls for the Government-owned Northern Rock to be used as the basis for a new state-backed bank in post office branches.
A coalition of groups, including unions
and businesses, published detailed proposals it said would give a big boost to
the post office network and prevent further closures.
A Post Bank would “revive and protect” post offices, support local communities and help smaller firms, especially as the banking system was still in “disarray”, it was argued.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
Excellent idea!
Let's get away from the fixation that only private, profit-making businesses can be allowed to provide the nation with the non-cash component of its money supply (ie, 97% of the money in circulation), and back to common sense.
Ellen Brown has written about the success
of the State Bank of North Dakota (see our entry yesterday, and here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-brown/californias-empty-wallet_b_222622.html). It's an
encouraging precedent.
And of course, if we also nationalised
the money supply, making the creation of non-cash "credit" money (ie, debt) by
commercial banks as illegal for them as printing notes or minting coins, it would also be
perfectly acceptable to have privately-owned banks lending out money which
already existed.
People could choose whether they wished to patronise the privately-owned businesses, or the Post Bank.
At any rate, it's good to see more grass roots-friendly solutions to the "banking crisis" (that is to say, the breakdown of our dysfunctional, debt-based monetary system) gradually emerging.
The latest debt statistics from Credit Action are now available!
Total UK personal debt ...
Total UK personal debt at the end of May 2009 stood at £1,459bn. This has slowed further to 1.4% in the last 12 months which equates to an increase of ~ £17.9bn (the increase was ~£116bn in January 2008).
Total secured lending on dwellings at the end of May 2009 stood at £1,226bn. This has slowed further by 0.2% to 1.3% in the last 12 months.
Total consumer credit lending to individuals at the end of May 2009 was £233bn. This has continued to fall to 2.3% in the last 12 months.
Total lending in May 2009 grew by
£0.6bn; secured lending grew by £0.3bn in the month; consumer
credit lending grew by £0.3bn (total lending in January 2008 grew by
£8.4bn).
Average household debt in the UK is ~ £9,305 (excluding mortgages). This figure increases to £21,640 if the average is based on the number of households who actually have some form of unsecured loan.
Average household debt in the UK is
~ £58,360 (including mortgages).
If you add to this the 2009 budget figure for public sector net debt (PSND) expected in 2013-14 then this figure rises to £116,200 per household.
Average owed by every UK adult is ~ £30,480 (including mortgages).
Read more ...
http://www.creditaction.org.uk/debt-statistics.html?utm_campaign=stats-mailings&utm_source=july
Whose Money? says:
This is the sorry result of choosing to create the nation's entire non-cash money supply (97% of the total) as a compound interest-bearing debt owed to the private banking system.
Until we see sense, and insist that our nation's means of exchange and distribution is provided by public authority, and free from any debt at source, it will be up to individuals, businesses and government to go into debt to keep money in circulation.
And when we're so sodden with debt that
we can't absorb any more - as, at present, seems to be the case - lack of
money will increase, and must inevitably continue to destroy the nation's real wealth.
Debt and scarcity are the unnecessary result of the way we choose to create our money, which imposes an artificial restraint on the real, productive economy, and on the abundance which we might otherwise enjoy.
Banksters Love Cap-and-Trade
James Corbett, The Corbett Report
The
sweeping new bill which just passed the House last Friday, the Clean Energy and Security
Act of 2009, is ostensibly about
climate change, but it is in fact a bill of staggering economic ramifications
that is going to accelerate the takeover of the economy by the well-placed
financiers who have already plundered the Treasury and the Fed of $12+ trillion and
counting. It was rushed through
the House in the tradition of such nightmarish legislation as the Patriot Act
and the banker bailout of last October: hundreds of pages were added to it at
the last minute and it was humanly impossible for anyone to
have read it before they voted on
it. This, of course, is exactly what Obama
promised his administration would
never allow to happen, and for good reason; bills passed 
in this manner are
always the result of fear and panic and inevitably results in legislation that
would never be passed upon sober second thought.
In this case, the rush to pass this new bill was an attempt to stop any scrutiny of a plan that is going to utterly transform the American economy, further centralize control of citizens' lives in the hands of unaccountable federal bureaucrats and complete the transfer of the American economy from Main Street to Wall Street.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
Even those who believe that man-made
global warming is a reality should seriously consider the implications of the
climate bubble currently being inflated by the profiteers of an unholy alliance of
finance, big business and government.
Is there really no way to address very real problems of waste and pollution, not to mention what we consider to be the imaginary one of anthropogenic climate change, than schemes apparently designed to feather the nests of a select élite - and which, even worse, threaten to set up a "Global Warming Gestapo" (see the video inset in the article, or at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9FX1fojAJM)?
Well yes, of course there is: get rid of the debt-based financial system which can only survive with the aid of bubble-induced exponential "growth", and usher in the sustained, beneficial production of high-quality, long-lasting goods, with minimal waste and pollution: all made possible by the introduction of stable, debt-free currencies throughout the world.
Make purchases without cash
Tina Ames owns the Craftsmen Cafe, a
Clarence, N.Y. eatery that specializes in organic comfort fare such as chicken
soup and apple pie. Recently she needed to replace her restaurant's roof, a
$7,000 job. Ames was loath to part with that much cash and didn't want to take
out a loan. Her solution? She cut a deal with a local contractor who handled the roofing job in exchange for a Ford F-150 pickup that Ames no longer needed. "I grew up on a farm," she says. "If you had eggs and someone else had corn, you traded. It's an old way of doing things, and it makes a lot of sense."
(Picture : http://happyvalleynews.wordpress.com/2008/09/29/us-converts-to-a-barter-economy/)
Read more ...
http://money.cnn.com/2009/06/23/smallbusiness/fair_trade.fsb/
Whose Money? says:
We're going to see more of this kind of thing, as people refuse to succumb to financial scarcity when there are goods and services available in plenty.
If our rulers refuse to see sense, and
examine the excellent suggestions being put forward by money-reformers like Stephen Zarlenga and James Robertson, it's up to us to take matters into our own
hands: not only through barter and Letts schemes, but by devising our own local
currencies.
When people are released from the spell of orthodox financial dogma and get used to the idea that money should primarily be a useful trading aid and accounting system, human ingenuity will be unleashed!
Sunday, 5 July, 2009
The unemployment timebomb is quietly
ticking
... The shocker last week was not just that the US lost 467,000 jobs in May, but also that time worked fell 6.9pc from a year earlier, dropping to 33 hours a week. "At no time in the 1990 or 2001 recessions did we ever come close to seeing such a detonating jobs figure," said David Rosenberg from Glukin Sheff. "We have lost a record nine million full-time jobs this cycle."
... Europe is a year or so behind, but catching up fast. ... French president Nicolas Sarkozy, with a good nose for popular moods, says: "We must overhaul everything. We cannot have a system of rentiers and social dumping under globalisation. Either we have justice or we will have violence. It is a chimera to think that this crisis is just a footnote and that we can carry on as before."
Read it in full here:
Whose Money? says:
Sarkozy is right|: we can't carry on as before. This isn't just an ordinary spin of the wheel from boom to bust, as the "experts" have taught us to expect. This time, the debt-based financial system is finally breaking down.
Will it be replaced by some kind of totalitarian merger of government, big business and finance within a planned economy?
Or will our representatives take this
opportunity not only to introduce a publicly-authorised national currency, with
both cash and non-cash money issued free of any debt at source, but to tackle a
problem which has accompanied the rise of automation, and which, with the IT
revolution, now threatens even previously safe employment: the problem of how to
distribute adequate incomes when wage packets and salaries can no longer do the
trick?
As Ambrose Evans- Pritchard points out in this report, it's now not merely a question of redundancies. Working hours are also being cut, in many cases with disastrous impact on take-home pay; and wages are being frozen.
This can only lead to yet more business
failures and redundancies, as the effective market for goods and services
dwindles. And this at a time when falling purchasing power has led to the
standard two-wage-packet family, thus doubling the exposure of young parents, in particular, to a
disastrous loss of income!
This time, as Sarkozy says, we must "overhaul everything".
Let's hope, then, that the result will be a sane system, based upon the understanding that the purpose of an economy is not to produce money, nor even to produce jobs, but to provide a decent standard of living with the provision of plenty of goods and services for all.
Let's hope, too, that the new financial dispensation recognises the absurdity of responding to the need for less labour by dreaming up non-jobs to keep people "employed". Automation actually means that there is no longer any real need for the nine-to-five treadmill.
With each nation monetising its real wealth in the form of publicly-created, debt-free currencies, and distributing it, in part at least, as a non-means-tested national dividend for all adult citizens, people throughout world will be able to enjoy both a high standard of living and the increased leisure which we were promised back in the fifties and sixties of the last century.
When we have the potential for an
abundant future, free to follow our own talents and inspiration to
a greater degree than ever before, why struggle under an artificial burden of
financial scarcity and hard labour?
Here's the latest from Ellen Brown,
pointing the way forward:
California's Empty Wallet: Turning Crisis into Opportunity
California State Controller John Chiang
has warned that without a balanced budget in place by July 1, he will begin
using IOUs to pay most of the state's bills. On June 25, California Governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger rejected a plan that would save the state $3 billion by
cutting school spending, saying he would rather see the state issue IOUs than
delay the funding problem with a piecemeal approach. The state's total budget
deficit is $24.3 billion.
Meanwhile, other funding doors are slamming closed. The Obama administration has said it will not use federal stimulus money to prop up California; and Fitch Ratings, a bond rating agency, announced that it was downgrading the credit rating of the state, which already has the lowest in the nation. Once downgraded, California's rating is likely to fall below the minimum level legally required for most money market funds, forcing the funds to sell their California bonds. The result could be a cost of millions of additional dollars in higher interest rates for the state.
Read more ...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-brown/californias-empty-wallet_b_222622.html
Whose Money? says:
Keep at it, Ellen! You're getting the message across!
Examples like Guernsey and present-day North Dakota can't be quoted too often.
Another successful experiment took place in Wörgl, Austria, in the inter-war years (see http://alt-money.tribe.net/thread/70e5eb29-853d-44ca-9faa-b789d1757037).
If we want our children and grandchildren to escape from the debt-penury being experienced by this generation, not to mention the punitive taxation inflicted by all levels of government, as they struggle to service their unnecessary borrowing, we need to look again at the real purpose of money.
It wasn't meant to hold our well-being and creativity in check. It was meant to encourage their maximum expansion!
Saturday, 4 July, 2009
The Renegade Economist
The present financial breakdown (see last week's Renegade
Economist broadcast, here http://renegadeeconomist.com/headline/renegade-economist-talkshow-july-3rd.html) offers the ideal opportunity to return to common sense, with properly
funded public services like the Tyne & Wear Metro providing a tax windfall
from those whose property benefits from their creation.Friday, 3 July, 2009
Mish's Global Economic Trend AnalysisToday, Riksbank, Sweden's central bank cut the deposit rate to -0.25% effectively charging savers interest on deposited money.
Whose Money? says:Immigration facts and figures
Fraser Nelson, The SpectatorWhose Money? says:When every nation jettisons the present bank-dependent, debt-based financial system and takes the crucial step of monetising its own wealth, both migration and welfare payments will gradually return to normal levels throughout the world.
Thusday, 2 July, 2009
Crisis after £1.4bn East Coast rail franchise collapse
William Green, The Newcastle JournalBRITAIN faces a transport cash crisis after the £1.4bn East Coast rail franchise collapsed.
The Government’s transport budget could suffer a £700m hit following the failure of the franchise run by National Express since 2007.
Transport Secretary Lord Adonis insisted services would continue without disruption with “operational” staff moving to a new public company likely to take over from loss-making National Express later this year.
He has previously admitted such a move could cost taxpayers extra and wants to find another private operator from the end of 2010.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
We agree with the leader in today's Journal: "Nationalised once more, the East Coast main line should stay that way."
And how about calling a halt to the tendering for the Tyne &
Wear Metro service, too? The public company running it has already alienated itself
from the people of the region by calling itself "Nexus" - a name which
acknowledges no local habitation or loyalty - and is currently up for tender
to be handed over, with a sweetener of £300 million in taxpayers' money, to the
bidder offering "best value" - whatever the adjudicators decide that may be.
One of the bidders has already withdrawn, and over £1 million has been wasted, according to the RMT Union.
Why waste yet more money?
Most people who use the metro are happy with what is already one of the most efficient local transport systems in the country. So why not put all the available money into running the trains, and improving and extending the network as a non-profit-making service offering valuable support to the economy?
It always comes back to the same question: what is economic
activity for?
If, as seems reasonable, it is to provide human beings with goods and services, it's high time we stopped making the multiplication of financial units our priority.
Let's have well-funded services run on publicly-created, debt-free money, supplemented, wherever necessary, by local and regional currencies which would be acceptable in payment of wages and taxes.
The Great American Bubble Machine
... (Goldman Sachs's) unprecedented reach and power have enabled it
to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole
economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that
market collapses, and all the time gorging intself on the unseen costs that are
breaking families everywhere - high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates,
half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bail-outs. ...
The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful,
deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble
substance on Earth - pure profit for rich individuals.
They achieve this using the same playbook over and over
again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle
of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they
hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of
a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for
the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it
all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they
begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us
back our own money at inteest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a
bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling
this same stunt over and over since the 1920s - and now they're preparing to
do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet
...Whose Money? says: All you need is the licence to create purchasing power for yourself and other favoured individuals, and use it to manipulate the market ... any market.
1) that human activity is the major factor in any variations in temperature; or
2) that the kind of action proposed can make any material difference.
If we're really serious about eliminating the very real
evils of waste and pollution, the best thing we can do is legislate against a
monetary system that cannot function without endless"growth", and start
investing debt-free money in the production of high-quality, long-lasting goods
that genuinely satisfy human needs, providing an abundance of the good
things in life for all the people of the world.Sunday, 28 June, 2009
We shall be away until Thursday, 2 July.Renegade Economist Talk Show, 19 June
The manipulators of debt don't depend on land or houses to acquire the money that enables them to buy up real wealth. The financiers can find plenty of ways to exploit not only the real estate market, but every market that can be imagined. As long as they are in a position to acquire large amounts of debt from the banks to outbid others, they will be able to carry on inflating asset bubbles of one kind or another.Here's a link to the James Robertson video mentioned at the end of the interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHs9xnuxLhU
Saturday, 27 June, 2009
Power to the people! But is Labour's new public services initiative copying the Tories?
The Daily MailLabour will, next week, announce plans to give power back to the people with a new range of rights to health, social care, education, and policing.
The 'power shift' - part of the relaunch of Gordon Brown's ailing premiership - is seen as a huge U-turn over the target culture for public services championed by Tony Blair and a move that echoes the Tory party, which in recent weeks has pledged to give the public more rights should it win at the next election.
The initiative comes in the wake of another Labour U-turn on education where schools are to be freed from central government control.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
The only power that gives human beings genuine freedom of choice in their daily life is purchasing power, whether this takes the form of currency or barter.
Politicians should strike at the root of widespread public discontent by reforming a debt-based financial system which seriously limits the adequate provision of purchasing power. They can best do this by nationalising the pound, which would now be issued by democratic authority, free of any debt at source; and by encouraging the development of local and regional currencies.
And it's time that our representatives handed direct power back to the people by legislating for the distribution of at least some of this new, debt-free money in the form of a non-means-tested national dividend for ALL adult citizens.
Friday, 26 June, 2009
Fury as Tories claim North East gets too much tourism cash
Adrian Pearson, The
JournalTHE Tories’ tourism spokesman sparked fury in the region last night after claiming the North East was receiving too much money to market itself.
Tourist organisations who between them
contribute nearly £4bn a year to the region’s economy have been told they may
lose out as the axe hangs over award-winning national campaigns such “passionate
places, passionate people”.
Tobias Ellwood, the Conservative’s shadow
tourism spokesman, has warned that, in his view, there is up to seven times too
much money going to the North East.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
The photography in the ads is wonderful,
as, indeed, is the north-east of England: but we cringe every time the peculiarly inappropriate "award 
winning" effusions about "passionate places,
passionate people" waft out from the telly.
Who actually gives these awards, anyway?
But whether or not all this gilding of the lily (rather than an exchange rate which favours holidaying at home) has really been bringing more people to the north-east of England, nothing is more divisive than for the different parts of a nation to bicker about who's getting the money.
And it's all so unnecessary.
It's only our quaint belief that money must be created as a debt to fund only those enterprises most likely to swell the coffers of the banking system that leads to this endless competition for government largess (most of it borrowed into existence at exorbitant cost to the nation).
With publicly-created money funding
taxpayer-approved public investment, and a non-means-tested national dividend
for all adult citizens, that cut-throat competition could cease - especially
if it were supplemented by local and regional currencies in the initially less prosperous
parts of the country.
Energy giants making millions by overcharging households an average of £74 each a year
Sean Poulter, The Daily
MailEnergy companies are raking in an extra £1.6billion a year because they are failing to pass on the total fall in wholesale prices to customers, it was claimed today.
Every household is being overcharged by
an average of £74 a year, according to consumer watchdogs.
Gas prices should be at least 7.4 per cent cheaper, equivalent to £60.10 annually, while electricity should be a minimum of 3.1 per cent less, or £13.80 in a year.
Read more ...
Also from Sean Poulter in The Mail - and this in a country overflowing with water!
Thames Water hands out staff bonuses, while warning customers to expect price rises
Britain's biggest water company is rewarding thousands of staff with bonuses of at least £600 while warning customers they face inflation-busting price rises.
Thames Water, which has 8.5 million customers across southern England, sent out emails to all staff heralding the bonuses earlier this week.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
As we wait for the results of the tendering for the Metro, here in the Newcastle area, it seems clear, from these reports - not to mention from the financial difficulties being experienced by National Express, on the east-coast railway line, that privatisation is NOT the answer to efficient and cost-effective public services.
It is insane to starve our services of investment because we value money at a higher rate than the goods whose exchange it is meant to promote.
Whenever in doubt, get back to basics,
and ask the question CH Douglas posed at the time of the Great Depression:
What is an economy for?
Is it to produce money?
Is it to produce jobs?
Or is it to produce goods and services?
We behave as if the entire purpose of economic activity is to produce money: and this inevitably leads either to a dearth and impoverishment of essential services, or excessive charges, if we wish to enjoy them.
With our national currency issued free of any debt at source by a public authority, and fed into non-profit-making public services as required, plus a non-means-tested national dividend which raised purchasing power across the board, money could flow freely where it was most needed, instead of being drained off into areas which benefit only the financial system.
Areas like the property market, for instance ...
City says housing recovery is in sight
Gary Duncan, The
Times The housing market slump is close to ending, with prices set to bottom out later this year and begin rising again by 2011, the City is predicting.
A growing majority of economists are calling the end of a housing crash that has so far wiped about a fifth, or more than £40,000 on average, off home values.
A poll of economists by Reuters found a consensus that house prices will drop by 8 per cent this year — having so far fallen by about 3 per cent since January and by 16 per cent during the past year.
But the City’s experts are betting that average prices will then stay broadly flat next year and start rising again from 2011, climbing by 2 per cent.
Read more ...
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article6579493.ece
Whose Money? says:
But see also this article:
House prices could fall another 40% from
here
There have been stirrings of excitement in the property market recently. Data on activity, such as home loan approvals, has been picking up ever so slightly. And I've seen it at first hand too.
I was a member of the panel at an investors' seminar hosted by PFP Group in Harrogate last week. Two investors came up to me at separate times and said they were trying to buy properties but the market had got very tight and the estate agents they were talking to had never been busier. Did I think we'd already seen the bottom?
I had to disappoint them. I don't think we've seen the bottom – in fact, I don't think we're anywhere close. Here's why...
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
Take your pick.
Do you go along with the consensus of the "City experts" who got us into this mess in the first place? Or would you plump for the realistic approach which says we should expect prices to fall until first-time buyers can afford to enter the market, and the income/price ratio begins to make more sense?
We know which one we'd go for!
Thousands of people are falling into
negative equity or even losing their homes because the politicians and the banks
colluded to use mortgages as a way to inflate the money supply and engineer an
utterly non-productive boom.
Let's start producing real wealth in this country, instead of relying on the multiplication of financial units for our "prosperity".
With publicly-created, debt-free money we could have affordable housing - whether as owner-occupiers, or through private rental, public housing or housing associations - without repeated booms and busts in the property market.
Remember: if the banks hadn't been allowed to
lend money that didn't exist, the bubble could never have
happened!
Thursday, 25 June, 2009
An Englishman doesn't have to own his
castle
Most of us have a vague notion that home ownership is a peculiarly British thing. We entertain Arcadian fantasies about our houses and gardens, assuming that having your own slice of this green and pleasant land is part and parcel of grown-up life.
I am all for fairytales. I have a deep affection for Father Christmas. I adore the Easter Bunny. I even have a little crush on the Tooth Fairy. But it is high time we put an end to the bunk that surrounds the British property market.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
As the article states, regulatory measures and taxes aimed at controlling both loose lending by the banks and the use of houses as gambling chips might well have "unpredictable side effects".
Why not do the simplest thing?
Why not stop the manipulation through regulation and taxation?
Why not provide the nation with a publicly-created money supply issued free of debt at source, and make it as illegal for private businesses to create non-cash purchasing power in the form of "credit" (ie, as a debt against their customers) as it already is for them to print notes or mint coins?
If banks had been restricted to
offering loans from money which already existed, it would have been impossible
for them to inflate house prices way beyond their actual value by engaging in
loose lending. It would also have been impossible for wealthy individuals to
borrow huge sums from those same banks in order to use it for takeovers, or for
gambling in the markets.
We agree that the real meaning of an
Englishman's home being his castle has "everying to do with his legal rights and
nothing to do with owning the blasted place". (And those rights, we would add,
are currently being eroded even faster than prices on the housing
market.) But there are many advantages to owning your house, as those lucky enough to have paid off their mortgages will be only to ready to attest.
If you bought your home in order to
live in it, rather than to make a quick profit and move on, or to provide a pension pot for your old age, and if you were lucky
enough to make the deal before the banks inflated prices by creating unwarranted
quantities of debt for unsuitable borrowers, you will not suffer from any drop in your
property's real value. Prices may go up and down, but as long as you didn't borrow beyond your capacity, your house will continue to provide you
with what you expected of it. It will continue, in short, to offer a comfortable base, and a safe roof over your
head.
And in a sane world of debt-free currencies, with banks precluded from creating the debt that inflates asset prices, your property would also act as a reliable store of value.
Wednesday, 24 June, 2009
Ellen Brown, Web of Debt
It's time governments stopped taking the law into their hands,
and acknowledged that international agreements limiting national sovereignty
require the consent of the people.Tuesday, 23 June, 2009
"... the states and cities don't have the money for
infrastructure, and what they're doing is ... selling off the roads, selling
off the airports to private investors that are going to essentially turn the
American economy into a toll-booth economy, and people are going to have to pay
for what they used to get as subsidised services at cost in the public sector.
Whose Money? says:Monday, 22 June, 2009
Housing shortage causing decline of village life
Sarah Nichol, The Newcastle
JournalA CHRONIC shortage of affordable housing in rural areas is plunging traditional village life into terminal decline, according to a new report.
The National Housing Federation claims that many village shops and pubs in the North East will be forced to close down unless action is taken to address the lack of new, affordable homes.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
"Affordable" is the crucial word.
While decently-paid, productive jobs in
rural areas have been disappearing, over-paid, non-productive jobs (ie, work in
administrative and regulatory agencies and in legal and financial services, much
of which would be unnecessary if we had limited government and a sane economic
system) have allowed increasing numbers of city dwellers to acquire second
homes.
And loose lending by banks on the back of unrealistic property valuations, plus the false sense of wealth created by those false valuations, meant the incomers were happy to accept prices far in excess of anything local people were able to stretch to.
Our countryside will only come alive again when we return to a sensible policiy of producing as much as possible of our own food.
And this, of course, will only be possible when:
1) we withdraw from the EU; and
2) relieve farmers of having to go into
the red in order to help create the nation's means of exchange, and legislate
instead for both cash and non-cash money to be issued free of any debt at source
by public authority.
Michael Hudson, Global ResearchWhose Money? says: We're destroying our nation's moral and fiscal integrity with this war supplemental
Dennis Kucinich
"... and there's money to incentivise the purchase of more casrs, but not necessarily from the US, because a "buy America mandate was not allowed. Another $10and all we get is a lousy war ..."
Watch the video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUIpF3b9ZfI
Whose Money? says:
As in America, so in Britain.
We too need to return to home production for the domestic market.
For those who haven't yet heard it, here's CH Douglas speaking on the economic causes of war:
Friday, 19 June, 2009
Meanwhile, here's the latest article from Ellen
Brown of Web of Debt :Thursday, 18 June, 2009
Governor seeks more bank powers
BBC NewsIn a major speech in London, Mervyn King said the Bank could no longer act "like a church" whose congregation "ignores its sermons".
His remarks appeared to be at odds with those made earlier by the chancellor.
Alistair Darling told the same event he had no plans for fundamental changes to the current system of regulation.
For full report and to listen to what Mervyn King has to say, follow this link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8106209.stm
Whose Money? says:
Highlighting the fact that those making a killing through financial manipulation are out of control, Mr King points out that, "Warnings are unlikely to be effective when people are being asked to change behaviour which seems to them highly profitable."
What is more, with the pursuit of their own gain as their primary objective, financial insiders will always find ways around even the toughest regulations.
The best guarantee for a healthy economy,
served, rather than dominated by the financial sector, is sensible regulation,
plus the outlawing of bank money-creation in the form of "credit".
What is required is both cash and non-cash money issued free of any debt at source by an accountable public authority.
Just for fun, circulating on the internet:
Acronyms
Dear people of the United Kingdom,
Due to the current financial situation caused by the slowdown of the economy, your Government has decided to implement a scheme to put workers 50 years of age and older on early retirement. This scheme will be known as RAPE (Retire Aged People Early).
Persons selected to be RAPED can apply to the government to be eligible for the SHAFT scheme (Special Help After Forced Termination).
Persons who have been RAPED and SHAFTED will be
reviewed under the SCREW program (Scheme Covering Retired Early Workers). A
person may be RAPED once, SHAFTED twice and SCREWED as many times as the
government deems appropriate.
Only persons who have been RAPED can get
AIDS (Additional Income for Dependants & Spouse) or HERPES (Half Earnings
for Retired Personnel Early Severance). Obviously, persons who have AIDS or
HERPES will not be SHAFTED or SCREWED any further by the
government.
Persons who are not RAPED and are staying on, will receive as
much SHIT (Special High Intensity Training) as possible. The government has
always prided itself in the amount of SHIT it gives out. Should you feel that
you do not receive enough SHIT, please bring this to the attention of your local
MP. They have been trained to give you all the SHIT you can
handle.
Sincerely,
Gordon Brown
Wednesday, 17 June, 2009
Dutch supermarkets are hoping to phase
out the use of cash by 2014, the Financieele Dagblad reports on Thursday,
quoting the retail board CBL.Whose Money? says: At Whose Money? we are no longer using plastic to pay for everyday transactions, and are trying to increase our demand for cash as much as possible.
Ignore ads like this one from Maestro. Use cash as much as possible ... and, at the same time, campaign to make bank money-creation via "credit" illegal, and to replace it with publicly-created, debt-free money - non-cash as well as cash.
Bank workers and teachers among the 2,000 a day applying for a McJob as unemployment soars to 12-year high
Sean Poulter, The Daily
MailFast food giant McDonald's is being swamped by more than 2,200 job applications every day, including from bank workers, graduates and teachers.
The level of applications suggests the stigma surrounding the 'McJob' has been swept aside by people who are desperate for work and an income.
Figures published today showed that
unemployment has soared to a 12-year high of more than 2.2 million after a
record number of people lost their jobs in recent months.
The jobless total increased by 232,000 in the three months to April to reach 2.26 million, the worst figure since the end of 1996.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
Could it be clearer?
The unemployment figures show that the world is crying out for a new approach to money: one that would not only eradicate the systemic debt built into the present system (see here) but which would tackle the pressing need to find a better way to distribute incomes in an age of ever-increasing automation.
We note, with disbelief, that this report puts financial services on a par with manufacturing as one of the "international wealth creators".
As usual, the mainstream press is way off target. Financial services, unlike manufacturing or the production of food and raw materials, have nothing to do with the creation of wealth. Rather, they are concerned with the creation, manipulation and redistribution of money.
Yet although they cannot bring new wealth
into being, they can play a major part in destroying it - as we are seeing at
the present time, with the real wealth-creators falling idle, for lack of purchasing
power at all levels of the economy.
Tuesday, 16 June, 2009
'Huge job cuts' for public sector
As many as 350,000 public
sector jobs could be lost over the next five years, the Chartered Institute of
Personnel and Development (CIPD) is warning.
Chief economist John Philpott says the recession will bring "a bloodbath in the public finances" which will force employers to slash their workforce.
This could lead to "guerrilla war" in the workplace, characterised by repeated strike action, he said.
Read more ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8102121.stm
Whose Money? says:
Huge numbers of unnecessary jobs in the public sector have been created over the past few years.
The problem is that nobody can guarantee that it's only unnecessary jobs that will be cut, in order to save money.
Slashing bureaucracy in the NHS, for instance, might be beneficial if it were accompanied by reform of the financial system in favour of publicly-created, debt-free money, and a non-means-tested national dividend for all adult citizens.
However, it's more likely that the powerful bureaucrats with the big salaries will survive, while corners are cut in the actual services provided.
In an age of ever-increasing automation, providing everyone with an adequate wage packet (ie, with an income sufficient to purchase goods and services actually available) is going to become more and more of a problem.
The present global breakdown of our debt-based financial system offers us the ideal chance to revive home-based economies throughout the world, while embracing the opportunities for prosperity and leisure made possible by an understanding of the real purpose of money.
Monday, 15 June, 2009
CBI's economic outlook remains bleak
Philip Inman, The GuardianBritain's economic recovery will be postponed until 2010 as the world recession continues to undermine growth, according to the CBI's latest economic outlook published today. The forecast was seized on by opposition parties, which said the government had under-estimated both the severity and the duration of the downturn.
The CBI said in its latest report on the state of the economy that while the situation had stabilised and optimism had replaced the despair at the beginning of the year, the rest of 2009 would be characterised by zero-growth coupled with rising unemployment and a possible acceleration in company collapses. Not until 2010 would the economy begin to grow again and then only slowly.
Read more ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jun/15/cbi-recession-report
Whose Money? says:
What it amounts to is that nobody has the least idea how long it will take to put the economy on its feet. How can anything be predicted, when the banks control credit, and we are dependent upon mass borrowing for our money supply?
One thing's for sure: attempts to restimulate the property market, even if successful, will do nothing to solve our long-term problems.
Nationalise the money supply, and concentrate on increasing home production to supply the home market.
Friday, 12 June, 2009
Meanwhile ...
James Robertson's latest newsletter is now
available at http://www.jamesrobertson.com/news-jun09.htm."The second is that, as so often, our approach needs to be based on both/and, not either/or.
"It is not a question whether to support decentralised monetary innovation against mainstream monetary reform, or vice versa. Both are essential."
We couldn't agree more.
Here's an article from James in Yes! magazine:
Money from Nothing: Supplying Money Should be a Public Service
The way money is created and issued, who
creates it and in what form—as debt or debt-free, in one currency or
another—largely determines whether a financial system works fairly and
efficiently or not. In our global village, money shapes our lives at personal,
household, local, national, and international levels. The system now in place
encourages or compels us all to get and spend money in ways that work against
the planet, against other people, and against ourselves.
Read it in full here:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=3498
Whose Money? says:
It's good to know
that James Robertson is working in close association with Stephen Zarlenga in
the States.
Let's hope a drive for fundamental reform on both sides of the Atlantic will tip the balance in favour of a nationalised money supply.
From The Guardian, a discussion on the growing gap between the very rich and the very poor, with Polly Toynbee, Larry Elliott, and Richard Reeves.
The Business: The Wealth Gap
Listen to it here:
Whose Money? says:
We reckon a focus on inequality is a red herring.
With money no longer created and distributed according to the priorities of private, profit-making businesses as a debt owed to themselves, disparities would very likely be smaller: and, in tandem with a non-means-tested national dividend,everybody would have access to a decent standard of living.
We wish that those who are so concerned about the effects of our present financial system would look a bit deeper to identify the basic cause of so many of our problems, and start pushing for reform.
Thursday, 11 June, 2009
Arian Nevin, Global ResearchWhose Money? says:
It may be prophetic that among the brands
GM chose to kill was the Pontiac Firebird, a classic hot car of the 1960s
sporting the fabled Phoenix on its hood. In mythology, the Phoenix was a
colorful bird that incinerated itself in its nest, then rose from the ashes as
its own offspring. GM too, says Michael Moore, could be reborn as something
else. In a June 1 eulogy of sorts, he wrote:
“So here we are at the deathbed of General Motors. The company’s body not yet cold, and I find myself filled with—dare I say it—joy. It is not the joy of revenge against a corporation that ruined my hometown … Nor do I, obviously, claim any joy in knowing that 21,000 more GM workers will be told that they, too, are without a job. But you and I and the rest of America now own a car company!”
Read more ...
http://yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=3564
Whose Money? says:
Great article!
It's time the Greens dropped their emphasis on the increasingly discredited theory of global warming, and started campaigning for money reform as the best means of cutting out waste and cleaning up pollution.
Ellen also provides useful links to successful, and non-inflationary, gpvernment investment of debt-free money in infrastructure, and to promote economic activity.
Reform of the financial system - whether through a national banking system, or, even better, the nationalisation of money itself - would mean the end of headlines like this:
Leaders go to war over £26bn axe on spending as senior Tory lets slip plan to slash budgets by 10%
Gordon Brown and David Cameron went into battle over plans for
spending cuts yesterday. The Prime Minister accused the Tories of plotting to slash
public services after a gaffe by one of Mr Cameron's key lieutenants.
Tory health spokesman Andrew Lansley let slip that most
Whitehall departments would see their budgets cut by 10 per cent under a Tory
government after 2011.
But the Prime Minister was accused of hypocrisy after it was revealed Labour has already inked in £26billion of its own cuts.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
We're not denying that the nation would benefit if some forms of spending - for instance, on unnecessary jobs, excessive regulations and bureaucracy, etc - were to be cut.
But there are plenty of areas of public life that would benefit from the investment of public money - as long as it came free of debt - and which are currently being underfunded, or privatised, to the nation's present (and even greater future) cost.
It's time the question of how we choose to create our money supply was put right at the top of the political agenda.
Wednesday, 10 June, 2009
Arthur Scargill without brains or charm
I wonder from which source Bob Crow, the
leader of the RMT union, gets his news. Whichever it is, I have some advice:
change it.
It seems that Mr Crow's news provider has omitted to cover a story that the rest of us became aware of a while ago: the collapse of the economy.
Read more ...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6465966.ece
Whose Money? says:
It's easy to deride the tube workers, as the comments under this article prove. But can you blame ordinary people with bills to pay, massive mortgage debt (specifically encouraged by a system that relies on borrowing for its money supply, and families to support for trying to defend their living standards?
Yes, it's equally impossible to blame businesses for seeking to keep costs down.
So, instead of taking sides, why not tackle the real problem, whose roots lie in the way we create the nation's purchasing power.
Why not have a tax strike, to force the government to stop sinking us all deeper and deeper into the red, and provide us with a stable stock of publicly-created, debt-free money?
The collapse of the real economy has been a long-term process, as crippling regulations, and the EU's designation of "its" UK "regions" as best-suited to specialise in such things as finance and tourism, have eroded an industrial and manufacturing base already weakened by our achronic reliance on debt-money (see The Grip of Death, by Michael Rowbotham, first chapter and where to order here).
The present acute crisis is primarily financial, not economic: and by setting our financial house in order (not by "living within our means", but by taking systemic debt to the banks out of the equation) we could also take the first steps towards regenerating our national economy.
NHS 'faces huge budget shortfall'
Branwen Jeffreys, BBC NewsThe health service will face the most severe and sustained financial shortfall in its history after 2011, a report by NHS managers warns.
The NHS Confederation report says the health service in England will not survive unchanged, the BBC has learned.
Read more ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8091427.stm
Whose Money? says:
It's probably for the best if the NHS doesn't remain unchanged.
However, the kind of changes envisaged are probably not the ones most people woulod prefer.
In a service which still depends so greatly on human labour, the financial situation could be transformed by the introduction of vouchers circulated via the wage packets of NHS employees. These could be used by the public in their day-to-day transactions, and would be acceptable to both purchasers and vendors, because government would accept them in payment of taxes.
Of course, far more satisfactory would be a complete overhaul of the way we create our means of exchange and distribution, based on a more realistic understanding not only of money's proper place in the economy, but of what economic activity is actually for.
Is it to create money?
Is it to create jobs?
Or is it to create and distribute the goods and services we all need?
Tuesday, 9 June, 2009
IMF tells Europe to come clean on bank losses
... "To restore confidence, you need
total disclosure of possible losses," said Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF's
managing director. "Not only losses which are linked to the original sub-prime
crisis, but also the losses linked to the slowdown in the economy, and impaired
assets. There are lots of things that still have to be disclosed," he said,
adding that credit mechanism remained jammed. Whose Money? says:Then you allow publicly-created, debt-free cash dwindle to a mere 3% of purchasing power. Then you release the banks from any kind of effective regulation, and call the mass borrowing-fuelled outbreak of consumption that follows a "boom".
Then, when people start defaulting
on debts and the asset bubble which "backed" them pops, the insolvent lenders
demand recompense from nations threatened with the loss of their money supply
should the banks have nothing to lend.It's worked before (see, for
instance, Ellen Brown's articles on Web of Debt, http://www.webofdebt.com)
and it can work again.Bernard Von NotHaus, Liberty Dollar
The last two days have been amazing!
Just shortly after midnight on Tuesday, the phone started ringing and I let the
answering machine take the call. But very soon there was another call… with an
even more urgent message! Very quickly, a friend of Kevin Innes, explained to me
that Kevin had been "detained" by the local sheriff and was being held for the
FBI to arrest him! Holy Cow!! The #2 supporter for the Liberty Dollar and
co-instructor at the Liberty Dollar University training sessions was in deep
trouble with the Feds! I was sure to be next. But would they arrive in a few
minutes or would it be a pre-dawn Nazi style assault? Whose Money? says: But to provide adequate everyday purchasing power for all, what we need is publicly-created, debt-free money.
Monday, 8 June, 2009
Petrol prices 'to hit £1.15 a litre' as drivers are warned to expect pain at the pumps
Nick McDermott, The Daily
MailMotorists face another summer of misery at the pumps, with prices likely to reach 115p a litre over the next few months, warn analysts.
The average price of unleaded fuel broke through the £1 a litre mark last week and experts say prices will carry on rising steadily.
Despite families enjoying record price
deflation overall in April, fuel has bucked the trend, due to the increasing
price of crude oil.
The latest increase is also being blamed on City speculators, who are gambling on the future price of crude oil, artificially pushing up its value despite plenty of reserves.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
Firstly, we'd question the claim of "record price deflation".
Maybe that's true for people in debt who are enjoying lower interest rates; but we, as non-borrowers, haven't noticed a drop in our basic expenses.
Secondly, how many of the people busy speculating prices up are borrowing the money which finances their gamble?
Now, if it was illegal for banks to create new money in the form of "credit" ...
Sunday, 7 June, 2009
Watch it here: In an economy where money is a useful facilitator of exchange
and distribution, rather than a commodity to covet in its own right, maximum
production of high-quality, affordable goods for the home market can
be the first priority, with the import/export trade limited to a balanced
exchange of items specific to, or more abundant in, particular geographical
regions.Monday, 8 June, 2009
Petrol prices 'to hit £1.15 a litre' as drivers are warned to expect pain at the pumps
Nick McDermott, The Daily
MailMotorists face another summer of misery at the pumps, with prices likely to reach 115p a litre over the next few months, warn analysts.
The average price of unleaded fuel broke through the £1 a litre mark last week and experts say prices will carry on rising steadily.
Despite families enjoying record price
deflation overall in April, fuel has bucked the trend, due to the increasing
price of crude oil.
The latest increase is also being blamed on City speculators, who are gambling on the future price of crude oil, artificially pushing up its value despite plenty of reserves.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
Firstly, we'd question the claim of "record price deflation".
Maybe that's true for people in debt who are enjoying lower interest rates; but we, as non-borrowers, haven't noticed a drop in our basic expenses.
Secondly, how many of the people busy speculating prices up are borrowing the money which finances their gamble?
Now, if it was illegal for banks to create new money in the form of "credit" ...
Saturday, 6 June, 2009
Around 700,000 people are currently left off the official
British insolvency figures, even though they are technically insolvent. Added to
the official figures, this means the total of insolvent individuals in the UK is
now approaching 1 million. These 700,000 hidden debtors are the latest estimate
from a YouGov survey, conducted in consultation with R3, of the number of
individuals in Great Britain who are currently in a Debt Management Plan (DMP).
The 700,000 DMPs dwarfs the combined total of those in an Individual Voluntary
Arrangement (IVA) and declared bankruptcy which amounted to 190,000 by the end
of 2008. The number of DMPs has also jumped an astonishing 17% in seven months
(from August 2008 to February 2009). The official figures are only the tip of the iceberg in counting the UKs insolvent individuals. If the government wants to take an accurate picture of our debt problem, DMPs should be included in the official figures, said R3 President Peter Sargent.
Read more ...
We have the materials available. We have sufficient energy for the present, and the potential to develop newer, cleaner and more efficient means of powering production. We have the labour, we have the talent, we have the skills waiting to
be passed on to future generations, who can develop them further.Friday, 5 June, 2009
Feds Bringing Back No Money Down
Mortgages
Now the federal government is bringing back the days of 0% down ...
Read more ...
http://www.businessinsider.com/feds-bringing-back-no-money-down-mortgages-2009-6
Whose Money? says:
Anything rather than tackle the underlying question of whether the best way to supply an economy with money must be to force more and more people deeper and deeper into debt!
Thursday, 4 June, 2009
Jobs threat as Dairy Farmers of Britain
go 
into receivership
HUNDREDS of jobs are under threat after a milk production site went into receivership.
The Dairy Farmers of Britain, which employs 2,200 workers across three UK sites including Blaydon, in Gateshead, has struggled with the falling price of milk and dairy products.
The price of milk has plummeted in recent months forcing DFOB to make the move. But it comes as a blow for 600 farmer members across the North. It is feared many will not be paid for last month’s milk.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
Money was devised as a means to make the exchange of goods and services easier. Today, it no longer performs that task efficiently.
Instead, we have landed ourselves with a monetary
system so dysfunctional that it actually makes the production of basic goods
financially untenable.
Since all non-cash money (around 97% of the total money
supply) has to be borrowed into existence, debt is built into every level of
production and distribution, while the purchasing power of both producers and
consumers is eroded through heavy mortgage borrowing, penal levels of taxation,
and chronic inflation.
Cash-strapped consumers seek out the low prices offered by powerful supermarket chains. Producers, unable to compete with cheap imports as the world is "awash with dairy products", go bust when the big distributors hold them to ransom.
Today's world-wide crisis brings an ideal opportunity for every nation to switch to a more benign financial and economic system: without the cut-throat competition for money which leads to over-production in pursuit of exports and which ensures that cheapness, rather than quality and freshness, holds sway.
With a publicly-created national
currency, issued free of debt at source, money would be the servant, rather
than the master, of production; and each nation could aim to feed
itself, insofar as natural conditions permitted, from its own home-based
agricultural sector.
Wednesday, 3 June, 2009
Shrinking Mars bar: Size cut by 7.2% but price stays the same
Sean Poulter, The Daily
MailThe maker of Mars and Snickers has shrunk the size of the bestselling chocolate bars in what amounts to an under the counter price rise.
While the bars have been reduced by 7.2 per cent from 62.5g to 58g, their prices have remained the same.
The change was put into effect in factories in the second half of last year and the downsized versions are now in the shops where a Mars bar still costs 37p and a Snickers is 41p.
The tactic of secretly reducing pack sizes while keeping prices high is increasingly being used by manufacturers of everything from nappies to crisps and frozen peas.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
Inflation statistics are as dodgy as any other kind, when size, as well as price, is a moveable component. We've been aware of changes in packaging masking a cut in the quantity of numerous products for some time now.
In fact, price inflation is built into our debt-based monetary system (see our section on Systemic Debt, here).
Since purchasing power is continuiously disappearing from circulation in repayment of debts, not only is independent capital formation becoming harder, but the nation must rely increasingly on both businesses and private individuals going into the red to produce the UK's money supply.
Without all this heavy borrowing, the economy would grind to a halt.
However, the cost of servicing/repaying commercial borrowing must be added onto prices; while at the same time the cost of personal borrowing drains family income, ensuring a steady demand for wage increases.
Fortunately there is a way out.
With publicly-created money, issued free of any debt at source, price inflation would merely be a useful indicator of particular commodity shortages, rather than a constant parasite on purchasing power, no matter how plentiful the goods.
Tuesday, 2 June, 2009
The media remain focused on the venality of MPs and the hope
of "green shoots", following the rise in house prices.Richard C Cook explains what it involves:Those two problems are systemic debt, and the urgent need to find better ways of distributing purchasing power than by relying solely upon paid employment, in an age when wage packets are being eroded or destroyed by automation.It's up to us to disregard the ingrained dogmas of debt-based
finance, with their insistence on scarcity, and choose instead to listen to what reformers are saying and envisage a more
benign economic system: one which has the potential to supply all
our needs.When belief in the viability of such a system prevails, politicians will take the new paradigm on board, and legislate for the required changes.
Monday, 1 June, 2009
Posting by Ellen Brown on US Open Government Dialogue
websiteCongress could take back the power to create the national money supply ...
Whose Money? says:Sunday, 31 May, 2009
The media are still fixated on MPs' expenses - with the scam
that is our present financial system, and the devastation it is dealing out to
ordinary people, taking a back seat.Far more productive would be a media campaign to examine the warped attitudes to money which have obscured our understanding of what an economy is actually for, and, in consequence, distorted and impeded the production and distribution of real wealth.
Forget the mainstream media, look beyond the bankrupt beliefs
which have led to the present crisis, and start to envisage a very different
financial system: one which allows purchasing power to flow where it is needed,
promoting the security and well-being of all."By misdefining the nature of money, special interests have often been able to control a society's monetary system and then ... control society itself."
In this video interview, divided into six short segments,
Stephen Zarlenga of the American Monetary Institute shows how we can change
things for the better;Whose Money? says:Saturday, 30 May, 2009
The Renegade Economist
Talkshow - 29th May
Whose Money? says:
Wall Street's mantra is
that markets move randomly and reflect the collective wisdom of investors. The
truth is quite opposite. The government's visible hand and insiders control
markets and manipulate them up or down for profit - all of them, including
stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies. It's financial fraud or what former high-level Wall Street insider and former Assistant HUD Secretary Catherine Austin Fitts calls "pump and dump," defined as "artificially inflating the price of a stock or other security through promotion, in order to sell at the inflated price," then profit more on the downside by short-selling.
Read more ...
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13773
Whose Money? says:
Possibilities for manipulation of the markets are amplified by electorates who continue to allow the money supply be created as a debt to the baning system. This gives bankers the option of conjuring up new money for purely speculative purposes, the only consideration being whether or not the "loan" will offer them a good return on their "investment".
When ordinary people finally awaken to the fact that, if money is kept in its place as the servant of production, this is a world of potential plenty for all, the present system will inevitably fall apart.
Trade protectionism and world-wide economic contraction
Professor Rodrigue
Tremblay
When the economy is
booming, foreign borrowings and imports of goods and services from other
countries are most welcome. They allow for more spending without inflation and
they raise living standards. It is a version of having your cake and eating it
too. In an economic downturn, however, the political reflex of populist
politicians is to turn protectionist and to become economic isolationists by
raising trade barriers. In such an environment, foreign competition becomes a
convenient scapegoat for the crisis, even though the causes of such crisis are
most often purely domestic in nature.
Read more ...
Whose Money?
says:
This is the orthodox
economist's rationale for a system in which countries end up unable to support
their own populations in basic goods and services, and dependent upon the
goodwill of their cteditors to survive.
Professor Rodrigues is certainly right when he says economic downturns "are most often purely domestic in nature". They result from the decision of governments to borrow from the IMF and the World Bank instead of monetising their nations' own wealth. As a consequence, they are then forced to concentrate on exports, rather than production for the home market, in order to acquire the money to pay off their debts without further borrowing.
No nation should be producing cash crops for export while its citizens starve, or go unhoused or undernourished.
No nation should allow its people to be pauperised, or have their health undermined, by working long hours in disgusting conditions for a mere pittance.
Every nation should be able to ensure a decent standard of living for its own population through maximum home production of the basic necessities, exchanging only surplus goods for those unavailable within their own borders.
This can by no means be described as a "beggar-thy-neighbour" approach to economics. Healthy self-sufficiency, as far as is possible, is the basis for thriving economies and prosperous populations throughout the world.
Why should Chinese people
suffer, for instance, now that America is no longer in a position to import
their products? Won't it be a huge bonus for millions of impoverished Chinese
citizens if the fruits of their
industry are made directly available for their own consumption, rather than being
exchanged for dollars?
After all, what are
dollars? Can you eat them? Do you want to dress yourself in them? Will they
keep out the rain and the wind, and provide a roof over your head? Would they be any use to you on a desert island?
Even in an economy which uses money as a means of exchange, are they any different, in essence, from the purchasing power that can be created easily, and without incurring the least suspicion of debt, by monetising the nation's own wealth?
Well ... not unless they are specifically required to repay your debts ...
The protectionism argument only holds good in a financial system dependent upon borrowing: a system in which nations are forced to compete for money by exporting their real wealth, instead of co-operatively exchanging only those goods which are surplus to their needs.
As for the illusion that what we currently have is a "free" trade economy, it's only
when debt is no longer in the driving seat that we have any hope of experiencing trade that is genuinely free.
Friday, 29 May, 2009
House prices continue to creep up... but recovery isn't certain yet, say experts
The Daily MailHouse prices rose by 1.2 per cent during May as buyers continued to return to the market, figures showed today.
It is the second time in three months that house prices have risen, with the cost of property also increasing by one per cent in March, while a fall of just 0.3 per cent was recorded in April, according to Nationwide Building Society.
Read more ...
BUT SEE ALSO:
UK bank stress tests assume 50% house price fall
James Pethokoukis, Reuters
LONDON, May 28 (Reuters) - Britain's
financial regulator said the tests it uses to gauge banks' capital strength
assume house prices will halve and GDP shrink 6 percent in the current
recession, making it the country's worst for more than 60 years.
Publishing details of its "stress tests" for the first time, the Financial Services Authority said they assumed unemployment peaking at 12 percent, and no growth in the economy until 2011.
The tests also factor in a 60 percent peak-to-trough slump in commercial property values, outstripping the assumed 50 percent drop in residential prices.
Read more ...
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssFinancialServicesAndRealEstateNews/idUSLS62406320090528
Whose Money? says:
Of course we'd like to see the economy stabilising ... but not at the price of watching it settle back into the old, discredited model of speculative asset-price rises fuelled by borrowed money, with large sections of the population excluded from the bonanza.
This is the best opportunity we've have
for years to reconstruct the nation's economic life on a basis
of publicly-created, debt-free money, relegating banks to their
proper rôle of providing money which actually exists for long-term investment: particularly for investment both in new technologies and in production of basic goods for the home market.
What if our present rulers decided to stop throwing bad money after bad, and grasped this opportunity?
What a wonderful legacy that would be for any politician!
Business report throws new light on North East economic crisis
THE recession will cause the biggest
shake up of the country’s business landscape since the industrial revolution,
finally bridging the North-South divide.
That is the bold prediction of a major new report published today which also concludes that Newcastle will become an economic powerhouse – or ‘supercity’ – driven by new industries such as nanotechnology over the next 20 years.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
We certainly want to see the development of new industries.
However, it looks as if it's big business and big finance that are set to be in control of any planned developments.
We'd prefer to see debt-free investment in the region's future, based on publicly-created money issued as a service to the economy by a democratically accountable authority.
A subsequent section of the same report (page 4) highlights another factor which must be considered:
There's work in eliminating jobs
"THEY say it’s an ill wind that blows
nobody any good, and it seems the recession could be the force that finally tips
the North-South see-saw in favour of our region.
"But as well as boosting the overall
business climate of the
North East in the 
long-term future, the economic downturn has also given a
short-term lift to a number of the region’s companies.
"Replacing humans with machines has been a trend to come out of the recession and, as firms cut back on staff expenditure, North East technology companies have reaped the rewards."
Whose Money? says:
Great for the businesses providing the machines! Not so good for the families whose breadwinner is thrown out of work though ...
It's not enough to have a booming economy in "competitive" terms, with superficial prosperity masking a despised underclass relying on welfare and increasingly labelled as "useless eaters".
What if we really aimed to draw the
greatest benefit from the new technologies which are apparently set to close the
"North-South Divide" (remembering that some of the worst pockets of deprivation are
actually to be found in the "prosperous" south-east of the country)?
What if we took advantage of the need to work fewer hours and encouraged job-sharing and part-time work, making the possibility of increased leisure for all a feature of the new "business landscape" ?
In other words, how about a non-means-tested national dividend for all adult citizens, enabling them to maintain their standard of living on vastly reduced hours of paid employment?
How about a renewed focus on home and
family life, with one partner (or both partners, part-time) freed from the
routine wage-slavery resulting from our present dependence on paid
employment to distribute incomes?
What about enjoying the machine's ability to take the slog out of living, as we welcome opportunities to practise sports, instead of just watching them ... to develop creative hobbies ... to undertake charitable or artistic work just for the love of it?
Only think what a world of advanced
technology coupled with a new understanding of the real purpose of money could be
like!
A world in which all nations pool their
knowledge, co-operating to spread prosperity throughout the world, instead of succumbing to a beggar-thy-neighbour competition to export real wealth in order to service debt ...
A world in which the economic causes of
war have been eradicated, and where the elimination of poverty blackspots that drive people unwillingly from home and family in search of a better life has
made rigorous border controls unnecessary ...
Let's make sure that the economic renewal
promised by emerging technologies leads to more than superficial prosperity by demanding
reform of a financial system which is unable either to cope with automation, or to function efficiently without enforcing
astronomic levels of public and private debt.
Yes to technological innovation!
Yes to
increased leisure!
Yes to a national dividend, and publicly-created, debt-free money!
Thursday, 28 May, 2009
Heal the economy to mend the politics
In 1982 it was a war in the South
Atlantic. In 2009 it has been moats, manure and the flipping of houses.
Different mechanism, same outcome: the economy has been taken off the front
pages.Unlike the liberation of the Falklands, this is not unalloyed good news for the government. Voters may well blame Gordon Brown for the recession but Labour's poll ratings perked up on the two occasions the prime minister was seen as getting on top of the crisis – last October's bank rescue and the G20 summit last month.
Brown will seek over the coming weeks to shift the political debate back to the economy, but it is hard to see the slump doing much to change Labour's fortunes. The visceral loathing of MPs is a manifestation of deeper problems, economic in their origin.
Read more ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/may/24/economic-policy-political-crisis
Whose Money? says:
The good news - apart from the
slaughter of so many sacred cows, as "end-to-boom-and-bust" assertions were
proved to be false - is that "living within our means" will become
increasingly acceptable as we expand the natural wealth of this nation through
human skills and ingenuity.
Our first concern - and that of every other nation - should be to foster home production, with a view to becoming as self-sufficient as possible. When each country makes the well-being of its own population the priority, using debt-free money issued by a public authority to invest in national wealth creation, we can look beyond the present cut-throat competition for exports in service of debt slavery towards a generally beneficial exchange of surpluses.
If, as Larry Elliott fears, the government remains unwilling "to take radical action", it's up to us to refuse to walk helplessly into a long-term depression.
The materials are there. The skills, and
the potential to develop more skills, are there. And invariably, in times of crisis,
human inventiveness is at its best.
All we need are our own debt-free currencies, to facilitate trade and exchange, and develop our local economies.
The Bilderberg plan for 2009: re-making the global political economy
Andrew G Marshall, Global
Research
From May 14-17, the global elite met in secret in Greece for the yearly Bilderberg conference, amid scattered and limited global media attention. Roughly 130 of the world’s most powerful individuals came together to discuss the pressing issues of today, and to chart a course for the next year. The main topic of discussion at this years meeting was the global financial crisis, which is no surprise, considering the list of conference attendees includes many of the primary architects of the crisis, as well as those poised to “solve” it. ...
... “I am so unbelievably backteeth sick of power being flexed by the few. I've had it flexed in my face for three days, and it's up my nose like a wasp. I don't care whether the Bilderberg Group is planning to save the world or shove it in a blender and drink the juice, I don't think politics should be done like this” ...
Wednesday, 27 May, 2009
Santander scraps UK bank brands
BBC News Channel
Spanish banking giant
Santander is to rebrand all of its major UK High Street brands - Abbey, Alliance
& Leicester and Bradford & Bingley.
A total of 1,300 branches will have their
names changed to Santander by the end of 2010.
Any customer of the Abbey, Alliance &
Leicester or Bradford & Bingley savings will be able to carry out
transactions in any of Santander's UK branches.
Santander is the second-biggest banking
group in the world after HSBC.
Read more ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8069648.stm
Whose Money? says:
Fewer and fewer big fish left to swallow
each other! Monopoly, here we come!
Of course, Santander is no more a
"Spanish" banking giant than any of the ex-building societies it has been
mopping up are "British".
Above all nations reigns a transnational
plutocracy which owes no allegiance to anything but the endless borrowing into existence and multiplication of financial units: a practice which makes it possible for them to take over more and more of the earth's real
wealth.
So local names and places must now be
replaced with the kind of vapid, anonymous titles able to slip from country to country as casually as those currently directing global financial policy.
We're thinking of swapping to the Co-op
bank. At least its still has roots in the neighbourhoods it serves.
Here's a report that makes clear how little Spain is
benefitting from its nominal ownership of the world's second largest banking
conglomerate:
Spain rearranges furniture as economy sinks
Paul Day, Reuters, UK
MADRID (Reuters) - Moving a 17-metre high monument to
Christopher Columbus 100 metres down the road is how the Spanish government is
interpreting the advice of John Maynard Keynes.
The economist once argued it would be preferable to pay workers
to dig holes in the ground, and fill them in again, rather than allowing them to
stand idle and deprive the economy of the multiplier effect of their
wages.
Read more ...
http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUKTRE54Q01420090527?sp=true
Whose Money? says:
There will be no long-term solutions as long as we focus on tackling
unemployment instead of addressing the liquidity needs of an
increasingly automated society directly.
As we have said before, there are two problems here:
1) the fact that money can only be put into circulation, under the present system,
if governments, businesses and ordinary people are willing and able to go ever
more deeply into debt to the private banking system, at their own risk and
expense; and
2) that with progressive, and continuing, technological
advances fewer and fewer hours of human labour are required to provide people
throughout the world with all the goods and services they need.
Spain, along with every other nation, would do best to take
these problems as a starting point, and base any economic revival on their
solution.
To go on making it our primary goal to keep the entire population
employed full-time, in order to distribute incomes, when far, far fewer hours of paid work outside the home can provide the goods is pure Alice-in-Wonderland
logic.
CH Douglas had already defined the problems now urgently requiring attention back in the twenties
and thirties of the last century - see this speech delivered in Newcastle as
long ago as 1923: http://www.alor.org/Library/BreakdownoftheEmploymentSystem.htm#1a.
Why on earth haven't "the experts" caught up with him
yet?
But Governor, you can create money! Just form your own
bank
Ellen Brown, The Huffington Post
"I understand that these cuts are very painful and they affect
real lives. This is the harsh reality and the reality that we face. Sacramento
is not Washington -- we cannot print our own money. We can only spend what
we have."
- Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger quoted in Time, May
22, 2009
Christmas comes early, Governor. You can
print your own money. Fiscally solvent North Dakota is doing it...and so can
California. ...
... Only three of 50 states are now solvent, meaning they have
the revenues to meet their state budgets; and one of them is
North Dakota. It is an unlikely candidate for the
distinction. It is a sparsely populated state of fewer than 700,000 people,
largely located in isolated farming communities afflicted with cold weather. Yet
since 2000, the state's GNP has grown 56%, personal income has grown 43%, and
wages have grown 34%. The state not only has no funding issues, but this year it
actually has a budget surplus of $1.2 billion, the largest it has ever
had.
North Dakota boasts the only state-owned bank in the nation
...
Read more ...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-brown/but-governor-you-can-crea_b_207806.html
Whose Money? says:
Ellen's doing a great job, hammering in the very convenient
truth that governments seem unable to accept: the fact that there is no
immutable law of nature which says that only private businesses called banks may
create a nation's money supply.
Read more about North Dakota's state-owned bank in this link
from her article, here: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/03/how-nation%25E2%2580%2599s-only-state-owned-bank-became-envy-wall-street.
We'd add, for those wary of state ownership, that it isn't even
necessary to nationalise the banking system to escape from the present
impasse.
Stephen Zarlenga and James Robertson, for instance (see our Websites section, here), advocate
nationalising the money supply itself (ie, legislating for a public authority to
create the national currency free of any debt at source) and then allowing the
banks to get on with the business of making loans from reserves that actually
exist.
Or of course, you could have a combination of the two
approaches, with a nationalised money supply feeding into both state-owned and
private institutions.
There are so many ways in which human skills and ingenuity can
be used not to destroy or appropriate wealth by multiplying financial units but to increase still further the natural abundance of this earth.
So why allow a dysfunctional monetary system to keep us stuck in
a chronic illusion of scarcity?
Santander scraps UK bank brands
BBC News ChannelSpanish banking giant Santander is to rebrand all of its major UK High Street brands - Abbey, Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley.
A total of 1,300 branches will have their names changed to Santander by the end of 2010.
Any customer of the Abbey, Alliance & Leicester or Bradford & Bingley savings will be able to carry out transactions in any of Santander's UK branches.
Santander is the second-biggest banking group in the world after HSBC.
Read more ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8069648.stm
Whose Money? says:
Fewer and fewer big fish left to swallow
each other! Monopoly, here we come!
Of course, Santander is no more a "Spanish" banking giant than any of the ex-building societies it has been mopping up are "British".
Above all nations reigns a transnational plutocracy which owes no allegiance to anything but the endless borrowing into existence and multiplication of financial units: a practice which makes it possible for them to take over more and more of the earth's real wealth.
So local names and places must now be replaced with the kind of vapid, anonymous titles able to slip from country to country as casually as those currently directing global financial policy.
We're thinking of swapping to the Co-op bank. At least its still has roots in the neighbourhoods it serves.
Spain rearranges furniture as economy sinksMADRID (Reuters) - Moving a 17-metre high monument to Christopher Columbus 100 metres down the road is how the Spanish government is interpreting the advice of John Maynard Keynes.
The economist once argued it would be preferable to pay workers to dig holes in the ground, and fill them in again, rather than allowing them to stand idle and deprive the economy of the multiplier effect of their wages.
Read more ...
http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUKTRE54Q01420090527?sp=true
Whose Money? says:
There will be no long-term solutions as long as we focus on tackling unemployment instead of addressing the liquidity needs of an increasingly automated society directly.
As we have said before, there are two problems here:
1) the fact that money can only be put into circulation, under the present system,
if governments, businesses and ordinary people are willing and able to go ever
more deeply into debt to the private banking system, at their own risk and
expense; and
2) that with progressive, and continuing, technological advances fewer and fewer hours of human labour are required to provide people throughout the world with all the goods and services they need.
Spain, along with every other nation, would do best to take these problems as a starting point, and base any economic revival on their solution.
To go on making it our primary goal to keep the entire population employed full-time, in order to distribute incomes, when far, far fewer hours of paid work outside the home can provide the goods is pure Alice-in-Wonderland logic.
CH Douglas had already defined the problems now urgently requiring attention back in the twenties
and thirties of the last century - see this speech delivered in Newcastle as
long ago as 1923: http://www.alor.org/Library/BreakdownoftheEmploymentSystem.htm#1a.
Why on earth haven't "the experts" caught up with him yet?
But Governor, you can create money! Just form your own bank
Ellen Brown, The Huffington Post
"I understand that these cuts are very painful and they affect real lives. This is the harsh reality and the reality that we face. Sacramento is not Washington -- we cannot print our own money. We can only spend what we have."
- Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger quoted in Time, May 22, 2009
Christmas comes early, Governor. You can print your own money. Fiscally solvent North Dakota is doing it...and so can California. ...
... Only three of 50 states are now solvent, meaning they have the revenues to meet their state budgets; and one of them is North Dakota. It is an unlikely candidate for the distinction. It is a sparsely populated state of fewer than 700,000 people, largely located in isolated farming communities afflicted with cold weather. Yet since 2000, the state's GNP has grown 56%, personal income has grown 43%, and wages have grown 34%. The state not only has no funding issues, but this year it actually has a budget surplus of $1.2 billion, the largest it has ever had.
North Dakota boasts the only state-owned bank in the nation ...
Read more ...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-brown/but-governor-you-can-crea_b_207806.html
Whose Money? says:
Ellen's doing a great job, hammering in the very convenient truth that governments seem unable to accept: the fact that there is no immutable law of nature which says that only private businesses called banks may create a nation's money supply.
Read more about North Dakota's state-owned bank in this link from her article, here: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/03/how-nation%25E2%2580%2599s-only-state-owned-bank-became-envy-wall-street.
We'd add, for those wary of state ownership, that it isn't even necessary to nationalise the banking system to escape from the present impasse.
Stephen Zarlenga and James Robertson, for instance (see our Websites section, here), advocate nationalising the money supply itself (ie, legislating for a public authority to create the national currency free of any debt at source) and then allowing the banks to get on with the business of making loans from reserves that actually exist.
Or of course, you could have a combination of the two approaches, with a nationalised money supply feeding into both state-owned and private institutions.
There are so many ways in which human skills and ingenuity can
be used not to destroy or appropriate wealth by multiplying financial units but to increase still further the natural abundance of this earth.
So why allow a dysfunctional monetary system to keep us stuck in a chronic illusion of scarcity?
Tuesday, 26 May, 2009
CITY FOCUS: Housing bubble begins to
burst across the globe
Anyone who is under the impression that Britain was alone in suffering a housing crash should think again. The global financial collapse has sent dozen of the world's property hot spots into deep freeze, research shows.
Latvia and Dubai have suffered the biggest housing crashes of any country worldwide, with values tumbling by a third over the past 12 months following the implosion of speculative bubbles.
Read more ...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/article-1187530/CITY-FOCUS-Housing-bubble-begins-burst-globe.html
Whose Money? says:
The banks were responsible for granting unrealistically high mortgages to unsuitable applicants in the first place. They should reduce what mortgagees owe to them, in line with current property valuations, and bear the losses.
That might help us get back to the realisation that money is only a useful, but fluctuating, measure of value, rather than something which has immutable value in its own right.
What's the commercial driver of the economy going to be if it's not financial services?
Richard Tyler, The Daily
TelegraphBut change our perception to what? If financial services are no longer going to rule the roost as the economy is "rebalanced" (somehow) and we are all going to live in a Gordon Brown's new world order of allotment capitalism (he prefers "sustainable capitalism"), exactly what commercial activity is going to drive the economy out of recession and back to long term trend growth rates?
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
Perhaps our big problem is all those clever people in positions of influence who keep drumming it into our heads that "there is no natural choice to do the work in the UK".
Utter nonsense!
What could be more natural than for each nation to choose to produce as much as possible within its own borders, with imports and exports accounting only for what is scarce or what is surplus to requirements/unique to a particular geographical area?
With a focus on high-quality domestic production, the only justification for bringing in goods from abroad when we might make these for ourselves would be the cheapness argument.
Wouldn't it be more sensible to tackle the reason why cheapness has become so important: the fact that our present debt-based monetary system ensures inadequate and ill-distributed purchasing power, so that more and more people are forced to choose low prices over quality?
As for the suggestion that we should "learn to love the City again" ... do we really want to go on sacrificing the production of real wealth in favour of the manipulation and multiplication of illusory figures on computers, while importing food and other goods from low-wage countries whose populations starve?
And all this in a world of potential abundance! How daft can you get!
An interesting thread on the House Price Crash website:
Time to consider a citizen's income?
You can follow through all 48 pages of it here:
http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/forum/index.php?s=2b355c7a98b80ef9cfe75e891614615e&showtopic=111637
Whose Money? says:
Facetious comments are only to be expected, when ideas which not only contradict the ingrained puritan work ethic but come up against disgust with the present much-abused benefits system are broached.
But it's interesting to see that, despite the inevitable ridicule and incomprehension by those bogged down in chronic scarcity belief, such ideas are now being intelligently discussed by ordinary people outside of the mainstream media.
This is a thread worth pursuing ...
Just for fun (circulating on the internet) ...
Economic Models Explained
SOCIALISM You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbour.
COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk.
FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk.
NAZISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you.
BUREAUCRATISM You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away.
TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income.
SURREALISM
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.
AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow has dropped dead.
ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND VENTURE CAPITALISM You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.
The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an
option on one more. You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows.
No balance sheet provided with the release.
The public then buys your bull.
A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organize a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.
A JAPANESE CORPORATION You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
You then create a clever cow cartoon image called 'Cowkimon' and market it worldwide.
A GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.
AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows, but you don't know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.
A RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
You count them again and learn you have 2 cows.
You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.
A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.
A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity..
You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.
AN INDIAN CORPORATION You have two cows.
You worship them.
A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Both are mad.
AN IRAQI CORPORATION
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
No-one believes you, so they bomb the crap out of you and invade your country.
You still have no cows, but at least you are now a Democracy.
AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.
A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION
You have two cows.
The one on the left looks very attractive.
Monday, 25 May, 2009
expenses uproar ...As far as we are concerned, this is just a diversion from the real financial issue, which is that the decision to create money as a debt is artificially restricting the natural flow of abundance throughout the world.
Today the skies are blue, summer is beginning to unfold, and 
there is little point in letting a focus on gloom and muck-raking block out the sunshine.
Off for a walk on the beach!Sunday, 24 May, 2009
Restoring national sovereignty with a truly national banking
system
Stephen Lendman, Global Research
This is the sixth and final article on Ellen Brown's superb
2007 book titled Web of Debt, now updated in a December 2008 third edition. It
tells "the shocking truth about our money system, (how it) trapped us in debt
and how we can bread free."
This article focuses on establishing a people-orientated
banking system. It's high time we had one and reclaimed what's rightfully
ours.
Read it here:
Whose Money says:
All the politicians are talking about "change".
Whether by introducing a "people-oriented banking system", as
Ellen suggests, or by nationalising money itself, as proposed by Stephen
Zarlenga and James Robertson, that change should be focused on the flawed, debt-based
monetary system that's destroying economies world-wide.
Shame that our plutocrats just can't see that poverty is the
result of basing purchasing power on debt, rather than on the kind of production
that increases the real wealth of the world!
They reckon, instead, that the way to eliminate poverty is to tackle
population growth ...
Billionaire club in bid to curb
overpopulation
John Harlow, The Times
SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to
consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s
population and speed up improvements in health and education.
The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the
initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to
overcome political and religious obstacles to change.
Read more ..
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6350303.ece
Whose Money says:
They just don't get it, do they?
What's the point of giving money away, when you retain the real
wealth, and the debt-based economic system, that enables you to keep on
acquiring more?
We reckon that it's the elimination of poverty that will lead
naturally to a decrease in world population, rather than the other way
round.
The best thing these wealthy indiviudals could do is to campaign for
reform of a financial system which inevitably transfers real wealth into fewer
and fewer hands.
However, since theirs are the hands into which it is currently
being transferred, they may prefer to keep on dealing with the symptoms, rather
than the major systemic cause, of widespread pauperisation.
It's easier to enjoy a reputation for philanthropy by doling out
your excess billions (in the comfortable assurance that you are in a
position to replace them) than to welcome a new financial system which, while it
might still leave you quite a bit better off than most, would work towards the elimination of
gross extremes of wealth and poverty.
When the billionnaires acknowledge the essentially unjust and
inefficient nature of the system which made their disproportionately great wealth possible, and
actively seek to reform that system, they will truly deserve to be honoured as
philanthropists and benefactors of humanity.
Quote of the day:
"Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them
the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create
enough deposits to buy it back again.
"However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear - and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in." - Sir Josiah stamp, President of the Bank of England in the 1920s, and the second richest man in England
And with bankers you can include those deemed sufficiently
credit-worthy to benefit from the creation, for their personal first use, of
millions in bank credit.
In debt? You could be forced to sell
your home
Neasa MacErlean, The
Independent
Anyone with debts knows about the threats
of bankruptcy and repossession – but there is another powerful legal weapon
which creditors are using far more frequently in this recession. More than
200,000 families are now thought to be subject to a "charging order" on their
home – putting them only one step away from being forced to sell the property in
order to pay off credit card or other debts.
The Robinsons (not their real name) are
one such family. Mother, father and five children almost lost their home this
year after a debt-purchase company bought a £6,900 store-card debt of Mr
Robinson's. The company got a charging order put on the family's house last
November. This meant it could apply to a court for an "order for sale" on their
home: the property would then be sold, and the proceeds used to settle the debt.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
When banks have foolishly lent out trillions more
than they have in reserves and deposits, the government plunges the country ever deeper into debt in order to save them from having to admit their bankruptcy.
When ordinary people owe a few thousand
pounds - frequently because they have succumbed to temptation, and accepted the loans thrust upon them by businesses
desperate for endless "growth" - they are forced to sell their homes
in order to pay their debts.
Isn't it clear that insolvency is out of control, and running amok
through all levels of society?
Isn't it clear that the scarcity implied
by this situation has nothing to do with the potential abundance of our world,
and everything to do with the destructive, wasteful and impoverishing effects of the systemic debt upon which we have chosen to make our economic life dependent?
As Mike Hudson says (see yesterday's
video link), time for a jubilee ...
Restoring national sovereignty with a truly national banking
system
Stephen Lendman, Global Research
This is the sixth and final article on Ellen Brown's superb
2007 book titled Web of Debt, now updated in a December 2008 third edition. It
tells "the shocking truth about our money system, (how it) trapped us in debt
and how we can bread free."
This article focuses on establishing a people-orientated
banking system. It's high time we had one and reclaimed what's rightfully
ours.
Read it here:
Whose Money says:
All the politicians are talking about "change".
Whether by introducing a "people-oriented banking system", as
Ellen suggests, or by nationalising money itself, as proposed by Stephen
Zarlenga and James Robertson, that change should be focused on the flawed, debt-based
monetary system that's destroying economies world-wide.
Shame that our plutocrats just can't see that poverty is the
result of basing purchasing power on debt, rather than on the kind of production
that increases the real wealth of the world!
They reckon, instead, that the way to eliminate poverty is to tackle
population growth ...
Billionaire club in bid to curb
overpopulation
John Harlow, The Times
SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to
consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s
population and speed up improvements in health and education.
The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the
initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to
overcome political and religious obstacles to change.
Read more ..
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6350303.ece
Whose Money says:
They just don't get it, do they?
What's the point of giving money away, when you retain the real
wealth, and the debt-based economic system, that enables you to keep on
acquiring more?
We reckon that it's the elimination of poverty that will lead
naturally to a decrease in world population, rather than the other way
round.
The best thing these wealthy indiviudals could do is to campaign for
reform of a financial system which inevitably transfers real wealth into fewer
and fewer hands.
However, since theirs are the hands into which it is currently
being transferred, they may prefer to keep on dealing with the symptoms, rather
than the major systemic cause, of widespread pauperisation.
It's easier to enjoy a reputation for philanthropy by doling out
your excess billions (in the comfortable assurance that you are in a
position to replace them) than to welcome a new financial system which, while it
might still leave you quite a bit better off than most, would work towards the elimination of
gross extremes of wealth and poverty.
When the billionnaires acknowledge the essentially unjust and
inefficient nature of the system which made their disproportionately great wealth possible, and
actively seek to reform that system, they will truly deserve to be honoured as
philanthropists and benefactors of humanity.
Quote of the day:
"Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them
the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create
enough deposits to buy it back again.
"However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear - and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in." - Sir Josiah stamp, President of the Bank of England in the 1920s, and the second richest man in England
And with bankers you can include those deemed sufficiently
credit-worthy to benefit from the creation, for their personal first use, of
millions in bank credit.
national banking
systemThis is the sixth and final article on Ellen Brown's superb
2007 book titled Web of Debt, now updated in a December 2008 third edition. It
tells "the shocking truth about our money system, (how it) trapped us in debt
and how we can bread free." Whether by introducing a "people-oriented banking system", as
Ellen suggests, or by nationalising money itself, as proposed by Stephen
Zarlenga and James Robertson, that change should be focused on the flawed, debt-based
monetary system that's destroying economies world-wide.Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation
John Harlow, The Times
SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to
consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s
population and speed up improvements in health and education.
The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.
Read more ..
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6350303.ece
Whose Money says:
They just don't get it, do they?
What's the point of giving money away, when you retain the real wealth, and the debt-based economic system, that enables you to keep on acquiring more?
We reckon that it's the elimination of poverty that will lead naturally to a decrease in world population, rather than the other way round.
The best thing these wealthy indiviudals could do is to campaign for
reform of a financial system which inevitably transfers real wealth into fewer
and fewer hands.
However, since theirs are the hands into which it is currently being transferred, they may prefer to keep on dealing with the symptoms, rather than the major systemic cause, of widespread pauperisation.
It's easier to enjoy a reputation for philanthropy by doling out your excess billions (in the comfortable assurance that you are in a position to replace them) than to welcome a new financial system which, while it might still leave you quite a bit better off than most, would work towards the elimination of gross extremes of wealth and poverty.
When the billionnaires acknowledge the essentially unjust and inefficient nature of the system which made their disproportionately great wealth possible, and actively seek to reform that system, they will truly deserve to be honoured as philanthropists and benefactors of humanity.
Quote of the day:
"Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them
the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create
enough deposits to buy it back again.
"However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear - and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in." - Sir Josiah stamp, President of the Bank of England in the 1920s, and the second richest man in England
And with bankers you can include those deemed sufficiently credit-worthy to benefit from the creation, for their personal first use, of millions in bank credit.
In debt? You could be forced to sell
your home
Anyone with debts knows about the threats of bankruptcy and repossession – but there is another powerful legal weapon which creditors are using far more frequently in this recession. More than 200,000 families are now thought to be subject to a "charging order" on their home – putting them only one step away from being forced to sell the property in order to pay off credit card or other debts.
The Robinsons (not their real name) are one such family. Mother, father and five children almost lost their home this year after a debt-purchase company bought a £6,900 store-card debt of Mr Robinson's. The company got a charging order put on the family's house last November. This meant it could apply to a court for an "order for sale" on their home: the property would then be sold, and the proceeds used to settle the debt.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
When banks have foolishly lent out trillions more than they have in reserves and deposits, the government plunges the country ever deeper into debt in order to save them from having to admit their bankruptcy.
When ordinary people owe a few thousand pounds - frequently because they have succumbed to temptation, and accepted the loans thrust upon them by businesses desperate for endless "growth" - they are forced to sell their homes in order to pay their debts.
Isn't it clear that insolvency is out of control, and running amok through all levels of society?
Isn't it clear that the scarcity implied by this situation has nothing to do with the potential abundance of our world, and everything to do with the destructive, wasteful and impoverishing effects of the systemic debt upon which we have chosen to make our economic life dependent?
As Mike Hudson says (see yesterday's video link), time for a jubilee ...
Saturday, 23 May, 2009
What if Britain loses its triple-A rating?
David Stevenson, Money
WeekBritain’s in danger of losing its good reputation as a borrower.
Credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s yesterday effectively threatened to take away our AAA-credit rating. It downgraded the outlook for the UK from “stable” to “negative”, citing concerns about soaring public debt.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says|:
There is, of course, a way to turn things around.
This would involve creating new money, free of any debt at source ... not to give it away to the banks, at public expense, but to invest in producing the real wealth which has been lost over the years as we focused on the endless multiplication of financial units.
Who cares about triple-A ratings, if we no longer rely on debt to provide the nation with purchasing power?
Listen to what Michael Hudson has to say about debt-based economies in this video interview:
Six minutes with the renegade economist - Michael Hudson special
"Debts tend to grow in excess of the
ability to pay ... There are 8 trillion dollars of bad real estate debts ...
The goverrnments have a choice, they can save the economy, or they can save the
creditors that made the bad loans.
"Until the government saves the economy and rates down the debts to the ability to pay there's not going to be a recovery."
Watch it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pwAFohWBL4
Whose Money? says:
Great to hear someone getting down to brass tacks!
"The finance sector and the real estate and the insurance sector are not part of the real economy of production and consumption. ... You can think of the financial sector as being wrapped around the real economy, almost like a parasite ... the fact is, you can't save both the parasite and the host."
MPs' expenses are chicken feed, compared with the wealth extraction made possible by debt-finance!
Friday, 22 May, 2009
John Lanchester, London Review of BooksWhose Money? says: Thursday, 21 May, 2009
A week since our last entry, and MPs' expenses are still
hogging the headlines, with the financial crisis pushed into the
background.
Ellen Brown, Web of DebtWe have the materials; we have energy resources available for
the present, and the ability to devise cleaner, cheaper and inexaustible ones
for the future; we have the labour, the skills and the ingenuity: all that is
missing is the money to oil the wheels of production and
distribution.
In fact, some forward-looking businesses and townships are already doing this.
Why stop production and allow people to starve or suffer because of a failed accounting system?
You can hear some interviews with Ellen Brown here: http://www.webofdebt.com/media/And there are further articles on her book, Web of Debt, at the
Global Research website: here http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13559; here http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13599; and here http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13647.Thursday, 14 May, 2009
The Worst Case Scenario (Someone Has to Say It)
Seeking Alpha
Since the economy began sliding downhill in late 2007, mainstream economic
and market experts have consistently erred on the sunny side.
As late as June 2008, mainstream consensus held that the U.S. was heading for
a “soft landing” and would avoid recession. Several months later, the slump was
acknowledged to have started in January 2008, but we were supposed to see
renewed growth by mid-2009, 
with unemployment peaking in the eight-to-nine
percent range. A quick “shovel-ready” stimulus bag was supposed to set us back
on the road to prosperity.
In January, recovery projections were pushed forward to late 2009. Today, the consensus is for a mid-2010 recovery, with unemployment peaking at just over 10 percent. Clearly, the mainstream has struggled to catch up to reality for well over one year. What are the chances that they finally have it right this time?
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
Scare-mongering?
Well, this only claims to be the "worst case scenario".
But as far as we're concerned, the only green shoots
to watch for are those appearing in the real economy, rather than the illusory financial one:
and we don't see much happening there.
Wednesday, 13 May, 2009
Government restricts employer training
and apprenticeships
Richard Tyler, The Telegraph
The Learning & Skills Council (LSC) is in talks with training providers over the caps but it has warned that the current level of taxpayer support cannot be sustained.
The decision prompted the British Chambers of Commerce to accuse the LSC of mis-managing the high profile training schemes.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
The problem is not that the government is curtailing its support. The problem is that, because of financial considerations, government has to be involved in the first place.
What a difference there would be if debt-free money were to reduce the burden of taxation for the small businesses which are the foundation of any thriving economy!
What a difference, if young people could start training at the age of fourteen, so that they were fully qualified by the time they reached their twenties!
With a stable currency, created by an accountable public authority, rather than having to be continuously borrowed, repaid, and reborrowed into existence at huge national, commercial and personal cost, businesses would be in a better position to finance their own training schemes.
And wouldn't it be a good idea if government stopped dictating an ever higher school-leaving age, and restricted itself to providing a non-means-tested national dividend to all adult citizens, along with opportunities for anyone leaving school early to return to academic education at a later date, if so desired?
Parents could then confidently encourage their children to start acquiring a useful skill from an employer early on in
life, if they were bored with school learning and opting for truancy,
or classroom disruption.
Again and again, we come to the same conclusion: with financial security, people can be left in peace to find their own solutions, Without it, the State finds more and more excuses to rush in and make a dog's breakfast of our lives.
And to ensure financial security for all, the priority must be to make it illegal for bank loans to create new money in the form of credit, and replace systemic debt with publicly-created, debt-free money.
Photo of truants: The Daily Mail
Armageddon averted
Larry Elliott, The GuardianPanic over. Six months ago, you could not pick up a newspaper or watch the TV without sensing that the global economy was imploding. Banks were being bailed out, the stock market was in freefall, factories were being mothballed. Shaken to its very foundations, capitalism would never be the same again.
But that was then. Capitalism, it appears, has made a deathbed recovery. ...
... There is, though, a big difference between an economy getting worse more slowly and one that is fully recovered. Even if the modest signs of improvement develop into rising output by the autumn, there is still a strong risk of a relapse into a double-dip recession. Here is a checklist that should help determine whether the recovery is for real.
Read more ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/12/economic-recovery-recession
Whose Money? says:
We'd bet on the double-dip recession.
Unfortunately, it's financial capitalism, rather than capitalism, which may be making a deathbed recovery: and there's not much hope for the growing underclass, even if our dysfunctional, debt-based economy manages to pull itself together for another another cycle of boom and bust, as long as we continue to make the multiplication of money and financial transactions the be-all and end-all of economic activity.
The IMF collects debts on behalf of the world's largest banks
Michael Hudson, Global ResearchThe IMF, by its very nature, puts the internal logic of an arbitrary financial system above human needs.
The interests
of the vast majority of people in all "debtor nations" - not least Britain and
America - require that the needs of the "real economy" (the production and
distribution of adequate goods and services for the whole population)
should shape the financial system, and not vice versa.Tuesday, 12 May, 2009
Newcastle Council will spend its way out of recession
Adrian Pearson, The
Newcastle JournalCITY leaders have pushed council debt past the £1bn mark as they increase borrowing by £150m to spend their way out of the recession.
Newcastle Council leader John Shipley has given officers the green light to increase borrowing to pay off debt and hand out cash for a housing and regeneration programme.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
What kind of a crazy world is this, where councils are "borrowing to pay back debt"!
Of course Mr Shipley is right when he says, "It is vitally important during the recession that we invest as much as we can in the local economy."
Where he's wrong is in borrowing the necessary money.
The council should be issuing a local currency, in the form of vouchers distributed in part-payment of wages and pensions, and repayable as council tax: and local politicians of all parties should also be lobbying for a national currency created by public authority, and free of any debt at source.
Monday, 11 May, 2009
Now Bank joins the attack on 'too optimistic' Darling
The Daily MailThe Bank of England is this week expected to issue figures contradicting Alistair Darling's economic forecasts.
In the latest blow to the Chancellor's credibility, the Bank is likely to predict that the economy will shrink significantly faster this year than he claimed in last month's Budget.
Less than three weeks ago, Mr Darling said the Treasury expected output to shrink by 3.5 per cent this year.
But the Bank's quarterly inflation report, to be published on Wednesday, will say that he is being too optimistic.
Read more ...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1180148/Now-Bank-joins-attack-optimistic-Darling.html
Whose Money? says:
Why quibble about possible levels of growth?
The fact is that the present financial system is dead. The important question, as the following article indicates, is what will replace it.
The nature of the current financial crisis: the system is designed to exert total control over the lives of individuals
The Report from Iron Mountain revisited
Richard C Cook, Global Research
What impresses me in the current
financial crisis is the near-total failure of so-called progressives to
appreciate the magnitude of what is going on or the level of intelligence behind
it. How many will say, for instance, that the crash was deliberately engineered
by the creation, then destruction, of the investment bubbles of the last
decade?
When the financial system creates bubbles it drives up the cost of assets far beyond their true value in producing or storing wealth. When the bubbles burst the value of the assets plummets. Those with ready cash then buy them up on the cheap. When the dust settles more welath has been concentrated in fewer hands. The rich get richer, and ordinary people are left in a deeper condition of indebtedness, poverty, and pressure to perform to the liking of the financial masters.
Read more ...
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13551
Whose Money? says:
If you Google The Report from Iron Mountain, you'll come up with a lot of entries warning that this was a hoax.
If so, it didn't take in only take in natural born suckers, since the influential economist JK Galbraith was pespared to state: "'As I would put my personal repute behind the authenticity of this document, so I would testify to the validity of its conclusions. My reservations relate only to the wisdom of releasing it to an obviously unconditioned public".
This interview by Joan Veon of former Rhodes Scholar and US government insider, Harlan B Cleveland, is also interesting: http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/veon.htm.
Real cost of expenses may be extremism
Will Green The Newcastle JournalWhose Money? says: Is it too much to ask them at least to put their hands in their pockets to pay for their groceries, as other people do? Honest representatives would refuse to take advantage, and would accept no more from the public purse that the extra costs of living required by their position: and they would attempt to economise as conscientiously as if it were their own money they were spending.
And how many meals do these MPs actually have out of their own kitchens, anyway,
when they have the luxury of a pleasant, taxpayer-subsidised cafeteria on their doorstep in the new Parliament Street buildings?Sunday, 10 May, 2009
Taxmen to probe MPs over profits from home sales
Rajeev Syal, Toby Helm and Gaby
Hinsliff, The ObserverThe crisis over parliamentary expenses reached new heights last night as it emerged that HM Revenue and Customs is to investigate whether MPs have deliberately evaded capital gains tax when selling their second homes.
News of an inquiry by tax officials, which follows days of leaks about the way MPs have exploited the Commons' allowances regime for private gain, will inflict further damage on the already battered reputation of parliament.
Read more ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/may/10/mps-expenses-jacqui-smith
Whose Money? says:
Why should they care? They're doing very nicely under the present system, thanks to you taxpayers!
Shame there's no run-down on how Alan Campbell spends his Additional Costs Allowance ...
For extensive coverage on how our "representatives" feather their own nests at public expense, see The Telegraph, here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/.
But let's not get fixated on the issue of corrupt MPs, when even if they were whiter than white ordinary people wouldn't benefit much, under the present financial system.
Hand-in-hand with the venality of those elected to represent us is the shameless rapacity of a banking sector which, having ruined the real economy and robbed the UK exchequer of billions and the global economy of trillions, if not quadrillions, through its speculative profiteering, is now pleading for taxpayers to shoulder yet more risks on its behalf:
RBS chief Stephen Hester wants taxpayer to bear greater share of potential losses
Patrick Hosking, The
TimesRoyal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is pushing to sweeten the terms of a huge government insurance policy in an attempt to force taxpayers to shoulder a greater share of its potential losses on bad loans.
Stephen Hester, the chief executive, unveiling a first-quarter loss of £44 million yesterday, described elements of the gigantic £325 billion guarantee scheme as “sub-optimal”.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
It's not only the "gigantic £325 billion guarantee scheme" which is "sub-optimal", as far as non-consenting taxpayers are concerned - it's the entire financial system, which forces millions of ordinary people ever-deeper into the red, while allowing the least productive members of the work-force to cream off entirely disproportionate profits.
Let's say it again: the only reason it's necessary to save the banks is that, for some reason beyond the bounds of common-sense, we allow these private, profit-making businesses a monopoly on creating the nation's non-cash money supply - ie. 97% of all purchasing power.
Deprive them of that monopoly, and it's a whole new ball game.
And remember, as Aristotle pointed out,
money is not an act of nature, it exists by virtue of man-made laws, and it is
within our power to change those laws.
Quango pays £200,000 to staff... for a new job title
The Government’s equality ‘super-quango’ was in a new row last night after Britain’s spending watchdog refused to sign off its accounts over secret payments of £200,000 to senior officials.
The National Audit Office has told Trevor Phillips, the £110,000-a-year chairman of Labour’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, that it will not fully endorse its accounts.
Read more ...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1179941/Quango-pays-200-000-staff--new-job-title.html
Whose Money? says:
Our first priority must be to change the way we create our
money, so that all non-cash purchasing power is issued by public authority, free of any debt at source - as has been the case with all forms of cash since 1844.
But, as we see from this (and many similar) reports, that won't be enough.
Just as important will be the way we distribute the new, debt-free money, and who controls the use of our taxes.
Whose Money? believes that the best way to ensure greater prosperity and equality throughout the nation would be to legislate for a non-means-tested national dividend. This would act as a modest, basic income, and would be available to all adult citizens born in, or long-term residents of, the UK, who accept our Common Law and Constitution.
We also believe that if the kind of abuse described in this report is to be avoided, all taxes should be collected locally, and not one penny passed on to a higher level without detailed costing and the approval of those donating the money for public use.
Saturday, 9 May, 2009
and
predict new bull marketRising spirits among investors sparked a powerful rally in shares on both sides of the Atlantic. Leading experts predicted that it marked the beginning of a bull market, with share values back on course for sustained gains over coming months, and perhaps several years.
Read more ...
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/markets/article6251885.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=1185799
Whose Money? says:
Are the people making these prediction just plain stupid, or are they deliberately trying to squeeze a bit more out of the dying system by entrapping anyone who has any money left to squander?
What, precisely, has changed? Is the "real economy" showing any signs of recovery? Have the job losses stopped? Has the government announced a debt jubilee, and slashed taxes?
It will take more than a bit of PR to get the gambling casino on its feet again. Let the big-time speculators make do with the billions they've already pocketed.
Sensible people will focus on forcing their rulers to reform a thoroughly corrupt and dysfunctional monetary system.
No Way Out
Paul Amery, Blog IU.EU
Two news reports this week suggest there is no way out of the UK debt crisis, apart from overt or covert (inflationary) default.
The assumption of enormous financial sector liabilities by the UK government represents a reckless doubling-up on a losing position, just as the deflation of the credit bubble is hitting tax revenues.
Read more ...
http://www.indexuniverse.com/blog/5818-no-way-out.html
Whose Money? says:
No need for an impasse, and no need for inflation, if an alternative along lines suggested by James Robertson and Joseph Huber, in their book Creating New Money, http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/uploads/CreatingNewMoney.pdf, or James Gibb Stuart, in this article for Prosperity, http://www.prosperityuk.com/prosperity/articles/interest.html, is pursued.
America's Money Machine
Part II of Stephen Lendman's series reviewing The Web of Debt, by Ellen
Brown
Read it here:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13548
Whose Money? says:
Better still, go to http://www.webofdebt.com and buy the book!
Friday, 8 May, 2009
End bankers’ fat cat bonuses, say MPs
William Green, The Newcastle JournalALL BRITAIN’S banks should be nationalised and hit with a wealth tax to stop them handing out fat cat bonuses, North East MPs are demanding.
Blyth Valley’s Ronnie Campbell along with Jarrow MP Stephen Hepburn and John Cummings, who represents Easington, say that they are “shocked” by official statistics indicating City bonuses are likely to hit £7bn this year in the midst of the deepest recession in a generation.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
"Say MPs"?
Say three MPs, to be precise!
For a split second, glimpsing a quote from "Mr Campbell" which
accuses the financial sector of "running amok", we thought we had been guilty of
misjudging our own parliamentary incumbent.
But no: the other Campbell, Alan, who claims to represent
Tynemouth constituency, has nothing to say about the bonuses.
Well, let's give him the benefit of the doubt: perhaps it's because he doesn't feel that he's in a position to throw stones, given his own very generous salary and expenses, which in total cost the nation close on a quarter of a million pounds (without counting perks like subsidised food and wine in the very pleasant cafeteria provided for MPs in the new Parliament Street buildings).
Congratulations, at any rate, to the three north-east MPs who are at least attempting to see that top City bankers shouldn't be allowed to profit further from the misery they are inflicting on millions of hard-working people.
All the same, it would be better if they backed nationalisation of the money supply, rather than of the banks.
After all, if banks were unable to create new, non-cash money via the "credit" scam, they could safely be left to lend out a national currency which had been issued for the benefit of the nation by public authority, free of any debt at source.
economic
depression Paul Joseph Watson, INFORWARS.COM
On the eve of the 2009 Bilderberg Group conference, which is due to be held May 14-17 at the 5 star Nafsika Astir Palace Hotel in Vouliagmeni, Greece, investigative reporter Daniel Estulin has uncovered shocking details of what the elitists plan to do with the economy over the course of the next year.
The Bilderberg Group meeting is an annual confab of around 150 of the world’s most influential powerbrokers in government, industry, banking, media, academia and the military-industrial complex. The secretive group operates under “Chatham House rules,” meaning that no details of what is discussed can ever be leaked to the media, despite editors of the world’s biggest newspapers, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Financial Times, being present at the meeting.
According to Estulin’s sources, which have been proven highly accurate in the past, Bilderberg is divided on whether to put into motion, “Either a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty … or an intense-but-shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.”
Read more ...
http://www.infowars.com/leaked-agenda-bilderberg-group-plans-economic-depression/
Whose Money? says:
When the mainstream media are so divided over what to expect, and seem, on the whole, prepared to accept the "credit crunch" as a simple matter of unregulated banks being naughty, we might as well see what the "conspiracy theorists" are saying ... especially since they are, with increasing frequency, turning out to be right!
Of the two alternatives which they say Bilderberg has
in store for us, we'd prefer the prolonged depression: not because we want to
suffer, but because this would be fertile ground for locally-based money reform,
and economic regeneration at the local level by people who had lost all respect for the
ruling "experts", and who realised that the only way out was to start relying on
their own real wealth: initiative, ingenuity, inventive genius, and the powers of
co-operation and mutual support offered by genuine communities, as opposed to special-interest groups, quangos, and pseudo-charities.
Democratizing the US Monetary System: Urgency of the
American Monetary Act
Richard C Cook, Global Research
On Thursday, April 23, 2009, Stephen Zarlenga,
director of the American Monetary Institute (AMI), delivered two briefings on
Capitol Hill on the American Monetary Act that AMI drafted and that may be
introduced as legislation during the current congressional session. This single
measure has the potential of bringing together the tens of millions of people
who have realized it's our bank-run debt-based monetary system that lies at the
center of the financial rot that is destroying our republic and its
values.
Read more ...
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13520
Whose Money? says:
Zarlenga - who is in touch with James Robertson, (see http://www.jamesrobertson.com/), who makes similar proposals in the UK - is currently spreading the word about the American Monetary Act on the west coast of America.
For speeches, articles and videos, and to read the Act itself,
go to the website of the American Monetary Institute, here: http://www.monetary.org/.
At the same seb address you can order The Lost Science of Money : Zarlenga's book on how the present system evolved, and how well-proven alternatives were forgotten.
And talking of books, Global Research carries
what is promised to be the first of several articles discussing "Ellen Brown's
superb 2007 book titled Web of Debt".
Read the article here:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13510
Order the book here:
Thursday, 7 May, 2009
Fears mount for future of National Express as rail provider
FEARS over East Coast rail services are mounting after operator National Express yesterday admitted the recession has hit its finances.
Shares in National Express fell 7% as it confirmed revenue on the East Coast Main Line – linking the North East region with London and Scotland – grew by just 0.3% in the first three months of 2009, compared with 9% growth last year.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
Privatisation of the rail services was supposed to lead to greater efficiency. In what way can the constant change-over between companies running the east-coast line be called "efficient"?
The Tyne and Wear Metro is currently also under threat of privatisation, with three transnational companies competing with the in-house bid from publicly-owned Nexus, and a big present of taxpayers' money promised to the bidder offering "best value". Those who regularly use the service (or so we understand from Keep the Metro Public campaigners, who have talked extensively to people on the trains and outside stations) are overwhelmingly against any private take-over ... but with no public consultation or debate, and little publicity, their views are not being taken into account.
The fact is that, with the adoption of publicly-created, debt-free money the financial implications of running an efficient public-transport system would be transformed.
And even without the introduction of a debt-free national currency, it would be possible to improve the situation by part-paying staff with vouchers acceptable in payment of taxes.
For the time being, however, it seems that patrons of
the railways will continue to be tossed from pillar to post, as finance, rather
than their convenience, dictates policy.
Britons face working until 70 to help bring public debt under control
Whose Money? says: What is new is that they face being wage slaves until they are seventy, instead of receiving a pension. It's not five years of idleness they are losing: it's five years of comparative freedom, being their own boss.
Nor would a statutory extra five years wage-slavery have any hope of bringing "debt under control" on a long-term basis. The problem with debt repaid
at compound interest is that it is an ever-growing threat to real prosperity,
even without the massive additional borrowing undertaken by Mr Brown on behalf of his friends in the banks.
packets, with government taking an ever-heftier cut out of those
wage packets to propitiate the National Debt Monster in the Treasury cellars.Picture of Debt Monster from The Money Bomb, by James Gibb Stuart (order it here:
Wednesday, 6 May, 2009
Housing affordability is the best for
six years
The house price to earnings ratio - a key affordability measure - is lower now than it has been for more than six years, according to Halifax.
Further, the house price to average earnings ratio has declined from a peak of 5.84 in July 2007 to an estimated 4.34 in March 2009; a fall of 26pc.
The proportion of disposable earnings devoted to mortgage payments - another affordability measure that includes the impact of interest rate changes - has also fallen significantly due to the combination of the decline in house prices and the cut in interest rates to record lows (from a peak of 48pc in 2007 to 31pc in 2009 Quarter one).
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
Don't buy yet: there's no guarantee that interest rates will stay low, and if the following report is right prices may have a lot futher to fall ...
Moore Blatch warns of repossession crisis
Repossessions
expert, Moore Blatch is warning that the predictions for repossessions orders
and distressed sales could be far worse than those in the 1990’s.Furthermore it says in just looking at repossessions the real picture is much reduced as the sale and rent back sector barely existed in the 90’s, but already accounts for well over 50,000 distressed sales according to the OFT.
Read more ...
http://www.mortgagestrategy.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=185792&d=403&h=401&f=402
Whose Money? says:
More properties on the market suggests that buyers have the upper hand, and will push prices down as low as
they can. Best to wait before buying, whatever Mr Brown might prefer.
Tuesday, 5 May, 2009
Obama orders tax crackdown on U.S. firms
with overseas operations in new blow for British jobs
Barack Obama has ordered a tax crackdown on U.S. businesses that could have a devastating effect on jobs in Britain.
The President announced that he will end tax breaks for U.S. companies with operations overseas.
Vowing to bolster the job market in the U.S, he said his 'common sense' proposals would help fix a tax system 'full of corporate loopholes' which encourages American firms to ship jobs abroad.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
What's wrong with legislation to discourage jobs from going abroad? Perhaps we should do the same!
After all, if jobs are lost in the City, it could result in a shift towards the kind of jobs which produce real wealth, instead of the big rewards being in the manipulation and multiplication of money.
Monday, 4 May, 2009
Average worker pays £7.27 an hour in tax
Harry Wallop, The
TelegraphWhose Money? says: To avert another Great Depression, MPs must be challenged.
Of course, this could be the answer to both questions:
Study reveals true extent of 'old boys network' between Government and banks
Tom Peterkin, Scotland on
Sunday
new report that has uncovered the extent of the "old boys network" at the top of
British public life.Whose Money? says: 
Government
has only achieved its present overweaning power over the economic life
of the nation because the debt-money system controlled by the banks
ensures that purchasing-power is ill-distributed, failing to go where it is most needed. This encourages a culture
of hand-outs and special favours, with politicians playing different
interests off against each other. Under these conditions, of course
banks and government are in each others pockets, since controlling the
flow of money brings both contingents more wealth and more power.Sunday, 3 May, 2009
First-time buyers still struggling to afford supposedly 'affordable' properties
The IndependentWhose Money? says:
The problem is that interest rates will have to rise to
attract investors who have to fund our huge borrowing requirement. It is
expected that those in negative equity will see their variable mortgage rates
rise to 9% in the next 12 months. When that happens people will struggle to
repay their mortgages. Green shoots may wither if we get a late frost. That
frost is a cut in public spending and rising interest rates.Company failures are 'tip of the iceberg
Larry Elliott and Hilary Osborne, The Guardian
Insolvency experts warned today that a 59% annual jump in failing companies was "the tip of the iceberg" as official figures highlighted the impact of Britain's plunge into recession on the hard-pressed corporate sector.
Evidence that tighter credit, falling demand and a weak property market are pushing an increasing number of individuals and companies over the brink blunted fresh evidence that the economy may be through the worst of its downturn.
Read more ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/may/01/bankruptcies-insolvencies-increase
Nor is there any sign of the government (or media commentators) getting to grips with the underlying problem:
Cameron must tackle debt 's ugly truths
Lian Halligan, The TelegraphDavid Cameron warns we face "an age of austerity" and that a Tory government would implement "what could be one of the most painful round of cuts since Sir Geoffrey Howe's Budget in 1981".
By harking back to the "tough choices" of the Thatcher years, Cameron is starting to sound like a leader. But he's not yet even close to showing he understands the scale of the problem we face. Unless he corrects that fast, Cameron's caution will make this country's predicament so much worse.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
Promising headline - but then he goes straight into
the meaningless old "living-beyond-our-means-so-we
must-now-pay-the-price" nonsense, with no attempt to differentiate
between living beyond our financial capacity and living beyond our productive capacity.
This article is argued entirely on the faulty assumptions of the old, broken financial system: a system which decrees, on no rational basis, that a unit money can only come into existence if it creates a corresponding unit of debt , owed to private, profit-making businesses called banks.
Naturally, under such a system, interest rates assume an
unreasonable importance. If you can only create money by going into debt, then
high interest rates are going to restrict the amount of money
available.
Unfortunately the creation of money as a debt not only builds
price inflation into the system, so that savers must always seek the highest
interest rates to compensate: it also distorts the flow of liquidity, with banks
creating money for the people and projects most likely to boost their profits,
regardless of whether or not they will distribute purchasing power efficiently, or do anything to ensure the health of the
economy as a whole.
If the belt-tightening he advocates was likely to cause as much pain to the likes of Mr Halligan (or to Mr Cameron) as it is to those who already find the basic expenses of living a challenge, would he be so keen on it?
There's
a difference between cutting back on the luxuries to which you've
become accustomed over the "boom" years and finding yourself
repossessed or on the breadline: a difference which well-paid
journalists and politicians are unlikely to experience.
If they were, perhaps they'd be more interested in the ideas of money reformers.
Let's just take a look at the going rate for Westminster politicians:
Ministerial Salaries
Factsheet M 6, House of Commons Information Office
Ministerial
salaries are currently governed by the Ministerial and Other Salaries
Act 1975 (as amended) and are updated periodically by Orders (which are
statutory instruments). The Order first has to be approved in draft by
a resolution of each
House. Like Members' pay, the official salary
of Ministers has been the subject of review by the Review Body on
Senior Salaries (SSRB ‐ previously the Top Salaries Review Body) since
1971. Current salary rates are quoted on page 3.
For information on the salaries of Members of Parliament, see Factsheet M5. This factsheet is available on the internet at: http://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/M05.pdf
Read it here:
http://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/M06.pdf
Whose Money? says:
We note that our own MP, Alan Campbell, enjoys a basic salary of £63,291, plus a ministerial salary of £30,937: a grand total of £94,228.
We would query:
a) whether he reasonably requires additional living and travel expenses, rather than being expected to pay these costs from the extremely generous earnings already provided for him by the taxpayer;
b) whether the vast majority of what he does might not be performed both more efficiently and more cheaply by local representatives, or by families and individuals working on a community basis; and
c) whether it is possible for somebody on such a salary to appreciate the difficulties currently being experienced by those whose lives have been ruined by the policies of his, and previous, governments?
We are planning to write to Mr Campbell, asking him to support reform of the financial system. Watch this space ...
Saturday, 2 May, 2009
One £285m mortgage rescue scheme. One family helped
Whose Money? says:So the government "is keen to nurse the housing market back to health and give voters back the feelgood factor" - presumably to reduce the odds against Labour winning the next election.
If you're not a politician, though, what you want isn't a quick rush of "feel-good", it's the security of having access to sufficient necessary goods, and enough purchasing power to buy them.
A brief revival of the housing market is irrelevant.
Any sensible government would not only find ways to enable people to stay in their homes: it would get down to basics, and replace reliance on bank lending with a stable money supply, created free of debt at source by an accountable public authority.
Friday, 1 May, 2009
MPs: Bailed-out banks have let Britain down by failing to honour promise to
raise lending
Simon Duke and Sam Fleming, The Daily Mail
Banks which have been bailed out by taxpayers are acting ‘deplorably’ in the face of recession, MPs will report today.
They condemn state-controlled banks such as Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland for starving private companies of the loans they need to survive the economic crisis.
The banks’ failure to fulfil promises to raise lending is ‘devastating’ public finances and Britain’s economic future, they add.
Read more ...
Whose Money? says:
Yes, indeed, Vince Cable - how right you are! What a "disappointingly weak" report this is!
As usual the real cause of our problems is ignored - the real problem being, that if you allow private, profit-making businesses to control the amount of non-cash money in circulation, there's no point in complaining when they put their own interest (in every sense of the word) before that of the nation.
Why don't these disappointed MPs sign Austin Mitchell's latest EDM, The
Enforcement of the Bank of England Act NOW ?
(Read it here: http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=38435&SESSION=899)
To date it has only attracted ten signatures.
If MPs' best suggestion for solving our present crisis is to push businesses, families and individuals ever deeper into debt, they are no less culpable than the banks themselves.
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