Golem usually welcomes new commenters here, but he’s at a speaking engagement in Dublin tonight & is probably ‘off-line’, so I’ll step in. Welcome & thanks for the kind words!

The Occupy Wall Street movement has just started a forum to figure out what they plan to do going forward. A very encouraging effort by them & all their worldwide affiliate movements. I’ve just posted up on their forum & thrown in my 2ct with link to our esteemed blogger Golem here. My post there:

http://the99delegation.forumotion.com/t7-what-is-our-mission#1006

The hard money systems break down 100% as well, and mostly for the same reasons that fiat money systems break down.

Unfortunately, the report rather pulls its punches in an effort to maintain ‘objectivity’, arguing without any real conviction that we may need global anti-trust rules, but it does highlight how oligopoly happens as a natural consequence of the workings of the market, rather than through outright conspiracy

“It’s disconcerting to see how connected things really are,” agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.
…
Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs.
Bar-Yam says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won’t chime with some of the protesters’ claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world.

“Such structures are common in nature,” says Sugihara.
Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members.

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.”

This is the point made by Dan Alpert (managing partner of the New York investment bank Westwood Capital): ”Alpert doesn’t believe there was a capitalist conspiracy; his point is that had there been a conspiracy, the outcome wouldn’t look much different.” He sees it as the inevitable result of the formation of “the post-Glass-Steagall mega-monstrosities.” http://goo.gl/KU59b

This concentration of wealth and power is the inexorable result of market forces, which is why the wealthy and powerful seek to restrict intervention by government. Their greatest success has been to convince enough of the rest of us that this trend is in our interest through the promotion of a neoliberal ideology shot through with contradictions. Hence the explosion of blogs that operate as anti-government rantathons, by a rag-bag of right-wing libertarians, left-wing libertarians, and gold-bugs, which help to perpetuate rather than challenge that ideology. As a result we have the absurdity of people who, for three decades, have been calling for deregulation and small government, asking where the political leadership is, and why governments don’t seem to have any control over the economy!

Paradoxically, competitive ‘free markets’ have to be enforced – a lesson we had to learn the hard way in the last century through the development of anti-trust/monopoly legislation and the regulation of banking and capital through Glass-Steagall, Bretton-Woods, etc. It’s just a pity that we seem to doomed to go through the whole process again.

But, was Thatcher misunderstood/misinterpreted?
Would Thatcher, if in power now, by-pass the banks altogether and promulgate a free ‘exchange of goods’ free market ? Money being exchanged personally and some (not much, duh) ‘profit’ being made.
Is this what she really was aiming for?
Academics, we luv them and god bless them…. but their salaries are from the State’s ability to deal in world financial markets. Academia are just people who also need to live; so they sure ‘aint going to topple the golden hen.
Boycott the Banks?

Dush, you are very right to be skeptical of economic models even those that start from accounting.. but if you are going to invest time in this I think you could do a lot worse than working your way through Steve Keens behavioural economics lectures – starting here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWUG1n1jEJI

All the best.

Thanks for this Neil, I have been busy assisting with getting it to go Viral. Never return to a lit firework?

Yup that’s exactly what I meant, guess I shouldn’t be trying to post while working at the same time!