I dont want to get into a full argument – I have stopped looking at your blog since these posts. But note I take umbridge as an Irish person not on behalf of Spanish people. I do not like revisionism in history, particularly from wankers-with-an-agenda like Bloomberg.

And If you quote a largely bullshit article in support of your opinion I take this as an endorsement of that bullshit. Most people would I think.

Your work and reports on financial products and derivatives can be great but your ignorance of economic history and theory is catching up with you very obviously when you stray outside this area.

You were wrong on Switzerland too, you missed the economic effect of the construction boom there and blamed the inward movement of money there for price fluxuations. You were looking to support your theory only. So you cherry picked an argument there, which proved to be incorrect.

What I saw of your Irish appearence in NCAD was off the mark too. Max Keiser made the same mistake as you, live on the Vincent Browne show, and he was corrected on the spot – it is out there on you tube if you want to watch and it is very funny too.

I know you disregard economics as a subject or more particularly as a science, but this deliberate ignorance of yours is catching you far too often even for me, a humble amateur, to take seriously anymore.

What’s a conspiracy? Does it have to be long term like the whole Italian P2 setup dating from the Second World War… lasting 50 years

or a few mad rushed weeks in a developing crisis as for example, a certain Rebecca Brooks et al scrambling to get the allegedly incriminating archive boxes and computer hard drives to a safe place before the police arrive…

Or the games on EU taxpayers Golem is brilliantly analysing above with the ECB and Spanish banks

Or what happened to MF Global with its friends in very high places in the US…

Or what is happening to the gold price just now with possibility of a falling price against a rising demand… and why this might be happening

(a repost for an answer… that is possibly playing out as I write this
http://tradewithdave.com/?p=10106 )

Conspiracies dont necessarily need years in the planning they are often hastily cobbled together over a few days…. all they need is the motive and the conspirators

Having previously read much at http://www.monetary.org, am curious to hear if any here have read this book “The Lost Science of Money” by Stephen Zarlenga?
http://old.monetary.org/lostscienceofmoney.html

Really got a lot out of that Mike, I’m going to read it again in a few days. Shades of Greiber and 5000 years of debt ( These Anthropology Chaps are good aren’t they.)
I went off looking for Guido yesterday found this on his Blog.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Q9r1NLMFixo

I spent a lot of time last year studying dystopian films looking for the end of the trail for a progressive narrative, thats kind of been my purpose in comparative documentary media.

Has Mushrooming ever been the modus operandi of the State?

or Corporations ( come on they are the same thing thesedays?)

http://brokeninparadise.blogspot.se/2005/05/mushroom-theory-part-1.html

Thanks Mike I’ll be reading that this evening a break from the music theory of the past few days.

Jay D

Good luck with that, As you probably know, Farage is a banker apologist, amongst other things:

NF
“My name is Nigel Farage. I was born an Anglican but I was also born a capitalist because I worked in the City of London during the Thatcher heydays of the 1980′s and I don’t think that money is wrong, evil or bad.

It has become fashionable to bash the bankers, to say we must limit what people can earn (and) we must stop them having big bonuses, and this is all based on a huge misunderstanding. We cannot have nurses, doctors, schools and a civilised society unless we have wealth creation. If we tax punitively those that are most successful in this country they will leave our shores and go and work somewhere else.

Well, I was christened into the Anglican church and I chose as a teenager to be confirmed into it but I am a very lapsed Anglican now, I feel very disconnected. We have a Christian Socialist as Archbishop of Canterbury in Rowan Williams and he has joined the chorus of attacking the banks and the bankers, and money, and capitalism, and all through the crisis, ever since the banks started collapsing back in 2008, all we have had from the Church of England is endless negativity. Without the money the City of London has generated this country would literally be sunk.”

I wonder whether he would approve of a certain hippy type carpenter running the church ? a fella who was apparently not to keen on usury.

Thanks for the input. Hawkeye, I agree and had thought the question implied my scepticism but now see that the doubt is cast more on the debt based money by the way the question is phrased. So much for my double whammy!!
I also had the Localism Bill with its ‘presumption in favour of sustainable development’ in mind when trying to think of a question to put him on the spot with. Whatever he’s almost certain to lie/ spin the party line when he opens his mouth anyway! Thanks again

JayD

It might be worth revisiting what “Sustainable” actually means, and whether Economic Growth, year-in, year-out is at all a sustainable objective.

There are many good writers on the subject of sustainability in the context of linking our energy use, economic growth and environmental impacts. Chris Martenson’s Crash Course is a good primer. I also recommend the work of Richard Heinberg, Tim Jackson, Herman Daly, Gail Tverberg, Ugo Bardi & Nicole Foss.

Here’s a couple of links:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/sustainable-means-bunkty-to-me/

http://steadystate.org/what-is-the-limiting-factor/

http://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/04/26/can-we-expect-the-economy-to-keep-growing/

As to your question re:

“….economic growth, based on a financial system
that creates wealth from the issuance of debt, is in any sense of
the word sustainable and furthermore desireable?..”

I would say…it depends on how efficiently the private banks use their privileged franchise in ‘creating’ new money as debt to allocate capital to productive use in the real economy.

If they do it prudently, no problem. But I would offer two primary problems with their recent behaviour (developed & accelerated over the last 2 to 3 decades).

1. The ‘high st’ function of allocating capital to the real economy has become fully integrated (following continuous lobbying for deregulation) with the casino ‘financialised’ economy of (poorly named) ‘investment’ banking & ‘shadow’ banking. Economist James Crotty describes this ‘New Financial Architecture’ (NFA) in his 2009 paper on the structural causes of the GFC:

http://cje.oxfordjournals.org/content/33/4/563.full.pdf+html

A shorter piece from a UK Greens think tank provides a shorter but useful perspective on the changes in banking over the last several decades:

http://www.greenhousethinktank.org/files/greenhouse/home/Banking_inside_final_3.pdf

2. Effectively leaving the role of efficient capital allocation (for productive, job creating purposes) solely to the private banks (gov stepping back) has not produced the ‘trickle down’ or appropriate & sustainable balance of returns between capital & labour that the Thatcher/Reagan era (onward) said it would.

Banks have increasingly shunned long term investment lending for the real economy in favour of the higher returns of short term, but ultimately riskier lending for ‘flipping’ assets. (From the ‘tangible’ like real estate & commodities to incomprehensible ‘financial products’, CDOs, derivatives and all the rest of the systemically risky bets.)

Rather than ‘trickle down’, it has been ‘hoover up’ resulting in the increasing need for consumer debt to maintain aggregate spending (GDP growth). The consumer debt overhang (plus mortgage debt for over priced houses) is the reason why a prolonged period of stagnation (if not recession) is occurring right across Europe & the US. So many citizens are now in a prolonged period of deleveraging, so aggregate demand has slumped & unemployment thus remains high.

However, unemployment, relative to the post war period up to the 70s, has been continuously high. This is not just a loss for those unemployed, it represents £billions in foregone prosperity – goods & services not produced, lost forever. These costs are staggering, but rarely, if ever, discussed in the media. Andy Haldane of the BoE wrote a paper on these costs of the present GFC, comparing them with the compensation that a ‘Tobin’ financial transaction tax might offer. (Conclusion – insufficient.)

http://www.bis.org/review/r100406d.pdf

On this last point, MMT, otherwise ‘agnostic’ on the relative size of public/private sector, offers a simple proposition with its Job Guarantee (JG).

The JG is a voluntary scheme offering a ‘non-competing’ minimum wage job in the socially useful community/voluntary sector. (ie jobs not normally considered ‘affordable’ by public or charitable sectors).

It is an ’employed’, rather than ‘unemployed’ buffer stock of labour. A government paid (but not ‘normal’ public sector) ’employer of last resort’ scheme.

The simple propostion is this.

The JG is inherently, always, counter cyclical.

If the private sector can actually deliver what it always promises – jobs – then there will be no one (or only a tiny few) who needs a JG job. If the private sector cannot do this, the government paid JG steps in.

The JG participants get to maintain some skills, remain active & more employable. Society gets some socially useful jobs done, plus the extra spending of their wages helps to keep the economy going & counter the recessionary downward spiral pressures, whilst the private sector gets its ‘upturn’ going.

Sound fair? (And infinitely better for all than wasteful unempoyment?)

Professor Bill Mitchell’s MMT blog:

http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/