finance

You say you got a real solution,
Well, you know we’d all love to see the plan, oh yeah …
— John Lennon, 1968

God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.

Have you ever wondered what happened to the £375billion, equivalent to £6,000 for every man, woman and child in the UK, created by the bank of England electronically? This colossal sum of new money is created through the programme called Quantitative Easing (QE), and pumped into the financial markets by the purchase of government bonds.

Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever: But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an œconomy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure that he may speak it the longer.
— Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796)
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
— Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897)

Washington’s IQ follows the Fed’s interest rate — it is negative. Washington is a black hole into which all sanity is sucked out of government deliberations.
Washington’s failures are everywhere visible. We can see the failures in Washington’s wars and in Washington’s approach to China and Russia.

Step by step, Washington is inexorably setting up a major provocation against China. Until now, the Obama regime tightened a military encirclement of China, expanding its armed forces agreements with Japan, the Philippines and Australia. In addition, it has promoted the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), a regional trade agreement which openly excludes China.

Right-wing politics now dominate the globe. Broadly speaking, the Right can be divided into a US-centered right-wing bloc and a variety of anti-US right-wing regimes and social forces.

Eight months will have passed since the election of Syriza on January 25 up to the snap elections in September. During that time Syriza’s leaders play-acted their ‘opposition to austerity’ and then knelt down in submission to the ‘Troika’.

On the last 18th of August I attended the Robin Hood1 pop up lab in Helsinki, Finland. I was expecting one more of those nurturing sessions of saving the world with much love and of course, post-its! No, it was a well-attended session where a real practical approach is being thought out and applied.

Despite an increasingly loud conversation about inequality, its root causes remain intact. Stewart Lansley argues that the government has the power to tackle the issue if only it would consider new models of debt financing