One can see other problems to do with the comparative state of countries after the levelling and who gets to do what to recover. It’s so simple ne has to wonder why Japan didn’t do it. In cognitive overload searching for (private) debt/GDP I found this on zerohedge:
http://www.zerohedge.com/node/477285 – a World Bank summary of decreases and increases in private debt/GDP changes between 2007-2012 – most increase being in the BRICKS. It’s China approaching a Minsky moment sort of stuff and much worse than US/UK.

Of course, none of us is in debt if someone can’t call in the boys to come round and enforce it, as Nietzsche once quipped to remind on what bourgeois morality was based on. Henry George was my introduction to economic rent and I’ve long wanted to know how such matters as inheritance operates in such fields as debt. Titles promising such have tended to disappoint in non-explanation – ‘Babylon’s Banksters’ (Joseph Farrell) was not the promised alchemy of deep physics, high finance and ancient religion promised – etc. How much of today’s debt might be proceeds of what most of us would consider crime like slavery or government heroin traffic such as that run by the British and Dutch or ‘Red Rubber’? An answer to this might change our notion of moral hazard. We do tend to treat capital as neutral, itself a moral hazard when we allow investment of stolen capital, potentially on a massive scale if we could do a sum over histories.

I was thinking private debt from 65 – but didn’t say so. Steve Keen has more than a few charts that tally with my look. I’m a biochemist by training and find the lack of ‘books of standards’ I can trust difficult. Frankly, I wouldn’t start with ‘numbers’ – the cop in me sees control fraud everywhere I look (police statistics are almost the paradigm case, juked through nodding, cuffing, skewing ) and the classic control fraud in history is ‘debt’ – both monetary and indebting ideologies (like debts of allegiance to the Crown, water-gods and myths of origin). I’ve taught economics in universities from a business perspective, but could never stomach neo-classical stuff as anything other than performance management (what a performance)!
I was about 5000 words into conference preparation, so your intervention made me realise I hadn’t defined terms well! Thanks for that.
‘Forces’ operating in animal systems with regard to energy exploitation include slavery, rebellion against it, waggle dance communication, fearful screeches against dissent and altruism rather like Captain Oates saying he might be gone some time – scare quotations on all should be assumed. Such ‘human hive’ behaviour seems missing in economics, along with ‘big data’ intuitions that test our aggregates, averages and median modes of explanation in favour of control theory examination of actual behaviour by lots of individuals.
David is to be congratulated that many of the comments here are as interesting and sometimes more so than his original prompting.

The contradiction I’m trying to work on is the decline in productive profits (marxian stagnation) and the rise in finance returns – broadly incompatible as financialisation should be subject to the same competition (there is nothing ‘clever’ in finance – indeed the evidence is finance is less inventive than production). I know we know – so the question turns to how the ideology involved persists when it is in the interests of a tiny few indebting the rest of us, in the presence of substantive critique. The big metaphor around concerns the crimogenic and the financial world as mobsterism, smuggling (tax theft) and piratism (Bill Black plus if you like). If we were working hard in fields we wouldn’t take well to a few slackers claiming that them sitting round all day playing Monopoly was key to our production.

I looking for theory and evidence – something like Fred Soddy I notice by absence in economics – but find myself cornered by desire to produce a tour de force based on Wittgenstein’s ‘putting the question marks in deep enough’ – a move so radical I doubt much we now discuss would survive. It has to be simpler than that because I am!

Somewhere in between private debt also correlates with global wage arbitrage and the drop in liquid assets held by ordinary folk with aspects very similar to the control systems of the Nazis and Mao. I wonder if the figures are so clear we deny the explanation of cause because it is so terrifying and leaves one as a conspiracy theorist.

Couldn’t agree more about Henry George.

Quotes from Poverty & Progress here http://bit.ly/Upk6iL

example:

In short, the value of land depends entirely on the power that ownership of land gives to appropriate the wealth created by labour. Land values always increase at the expense of labour. The reason greater productive power does not increase wages is because it increases the value of land. Rent swallows up the whole gain.

That is why poverty accompanies progress.

Patricia I’m with you on land tax.. Henry George writes about it in an understandable way. It is perfectly simple and applies to everyone the same.

That was Phil (Mcr) too

It’s hard to imagine how we’ve come to this state of affairs until you grasp how the Treasury and Inland Revenue have been subject to corporate capture:

“Even giving some credence to the overblown notion of ‘tax competition’ among nations, quite why the world’s seventh largest economy should sell itself so cheaply looks like a mystery (but is in fact explained simply by the corporate capture of tax lawmaking).”

“The most infuriating aspect of this to those of us who like to report the furtive capture of the machinery of government by powerful vested interests is that there’s no secret about it. The Treasury’s mission is unashamedly to adjust the framework of tax legislation to suit large business.”

“British taxation policy really had been so comprehensively captured by the world’s biggest corporations that screw-the-poor policies like these could be written into the statute book at their whim, without a pang of conscience being felt anywhere in Whitehall.”

And the hypocrisy is stomach churning:

“In the same August 2011 week that Prime Minister David Cameron promised Britain’s rioting feral underclass ‘we will track you down, we will find you and we will punish you’ and magistrates jailed a youth for stealing £3 worth of water, it was with a special kind of upper-class insensitivity that the Prime Minister’s fellow Bullingdonian George Osborne granted immunity from prosecution to the feral financial classes who were looting the economy of billions.”

I’ve put up quotes from the entire book here http://bit.ly/15YAMTY

Happy reading

Joe

“Severe social breakdown on the coast as vulnerable pushed into low quality housing”

http://www.24dash.com/news/housing/2013-08-05-Severe-social-breakdown-on-the-coast-as-vulnerable-pushed-into-low-quality-housing

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/08/05/irel-a05.html

“British government steps up plans to sell off Royal Mail”

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/08/05/mail-a05.html