It's our bank - it's our money
The Bank of England secretly lent two banks $142 billion in October and November 2008 and this was repaid the following January. The London Evening Standard, now owned by a Russian, in an editorial [25-11-09] asked why the matter was kept secret for so long.
What the Bank - and specifically the Governor, Mervyn King - appears not to understand is that this is our money. Taxpayers bailed out the banks; we are entitled to know how our money is being spent.
The public - well me anyway - is becoming increasingly angry at the way the establishment is throwing billions at the banks while there is no money for small businesses, dispossessed house owners and the growing army of unemployed.
UK'S National crisis -thousands of unemployed graduates
Accountants PriceWaterhouseCooper sought to fill 1,000 graduate jobs and received 12,000 applications. Budget retailer Aldi sought to fill 130 graduate places and had 22,000 applicants. It is expected that at the beginning of 2010 of recent graduates 100,000 will be unemployed.
The research director at the Higher Education Careers Services Unit has forecast that the UK graduate market may not return to normal until 2013. That may be too late for many recent graduates to fit into available vacancies.
The unemployment crisis for recent graduates is not helped by the huge debts they had to incur to earn their degrees. One graduate, owing $30,000, is reported to have said that she might go to Australia to try to get a job there while another complained that it was frustrating that someone with the same qualifications as he a few years earlier could walk into a really good job but now that was impossible.
I am sure it would be useful to such graduates were they to research into why the difficult situation in which they find themselves could have occurred, and the basic reason for it. A useful start would be to browse through this web site.
Tory says no to bank bonuses- more money creation needed instead
On BBC television on 26 October 2009, the shadow chancellor, a millionaire who inherited, said that, instead of banks paying bonuses they should use them to rebuild their balance sheets. For example, he said, for every billion on their balance sheets they can lend ten billion.
There were no questions asked to explain where that extra money came from and why the private banks should be able to create the money while the government had to borrow from them.
What the Queen's speech should have said
When it came to the November opening of the British Parliament, the Queen's speech, written by the government, but read by her, was seen to be more of a political propaganda exercise than anything practical.
Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times [22-11-09]suggested what the speech should have said was what the reality of the Labour Government's record showed.
My government will encourage the financial institutions to bankrupt the country and, having done so, will claim the credit for having spent unimaginable sums of your money bailing them out.
My government will then get you to pay again for the above, either through job cuts or a freeze on wages or higher taxes.
My government will invite millions of people into the country, some of whom will undercut the wages of indigenous Britons, some of whom will contribute to the country's robust and diverse mugging ,robbing, stabbing, shooting and blowing-themselves-up industries.
My government will lie through its teeth about a referendum on the Lisbon treaty, lie through its teeth about the levels of immigration.
My government will enact countless and pointless anti-hate crime legislation which will make you scared stiff to so much as open your mouth.
When is a cast iron guarantee not a guarantee?
When it is given by a Conservative Party leader. In 2007, UK Conservative Party leader David Cameron gave a cast iron guarantee that if his party were to win power at the next election he would give the people a referendum on the infamous Lisbon Treaty.
They have yet to win power but Cameron has decided, as power looks more certain, to withdraw his guarantee. If a cast iron guarantee is worthless, what of all the other promises?
Of course there is a precedent. The highly unpopular Tony Blair promised a referendum in 2005 on the same issue to garner votes and just dumped his promise when the ruse succeeded.
Dumping promises after getting the votes to win power is not confined to Britain. It is usual practice for the New Zealand Labour Party, as history shows.
Don't tell the people
Have the authorities in our supposedly democratic country been deliberately concealing from citizens and their representatives how the money system they manage for us now works? Yes, of course they have.
In the last few weeks, this lunatic saga has continued to unravel. It still has further to go and more to reveal. Developed by us oh-so-clever humans and used by no other species, the idiotic way we allow our money system to be managed would be a joke - if it didn't cause suffering to billions of people and other creatures around the world.
Around the world now, a binding treaty, only prepares the ground for the possibility of one at a later date.
More important in the long run, none of [the thousands of politicians, officials, experts, NGOs, commentators and journalists from many countries are preparing for the Copenhagen global climate conference] seem to understand the link between the global environmental threat and global finance. It is that the world's money system now imposes a perverse calculus of values on countries, places and people everywhere.
This both encourages the better-off minority to try to preserve and expand their privileged economic and social positions, and compels the poorer majority to try to survive and maintain themselves and their families, in ways that are bound to overwhelm the planet's resources, including its capacity to absorb carbon and other climate-changing emissions. Without the worldwide money system's radical reform, any eventual climate treaty is bound to fail.
[from James Robertson's November 2009 newsletter]
Research work indicates flaws in financial system
Lowell Manning, a civil engineer in New Zealand, is one of many monetary reformers who have come from more practical professional backgrounds than economics. He has developed an up-to-date version of Irving Fisher's equation which has served as an analytical basis for many monetary reform proposals since the 1930s.
I hope Manning's work will come to be accepted as important for economists, as the need for monetary reform belatedly penetrates their professional minds.
One practical conclusion is that:
"the effect of unearned interest on deposits is to transfer claims on the real wealth of the nation from those who produce the economic output to those in the investment sector who produce nothing. Houses and other assets become more expensive in terms of the inflated prices in the investment sector but must be bought using the less inflated money of the productive sector.
Unless inflation in the investment sector and the productive sector are equalised, there must be an ever-widening gap between debt-bound wage and salary earners on the one hand and the participants in the investment sector with net deposits in the banking system on the other."
A short version of Manning's findings is at www.flowman.nl/lowellshortpaper20090706.htm
[from James Robertson's November 2009 newsletter]
- contributed by Colin J Whitmill, DSC's UK correspondent