Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Modern economic systems have sanctified the payment of debt but this is not some natural or God-given rule, rather a situation designed by financial elites. The wisdom of Rumpelstiltskin needs to be revisited and adapted for modern times.
Today, the wealthy depict inequality in glowing colors as a byproduct of economies pulling ahead, “creating wealth” by innovations that add to prosperity. This view is unprecedented in history. From antiquity to quite recently, personal accumulation of large amounts of wealth was frowned upon, because it usually was achieved at the expense of others.
When I was recently at the #CTRLshift conference in Wigan, one project that many people were talking about was Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn’s ‘The Bank Job’, currently underway in a former bank in Walthamstow. It had just been featured in The Guardian under the headline ‘The rebel bank, printing its own notes and buying back people’s debts’, and was generating a real buzz.
The recently passed federal tax cut seems perilous for the United States government and economy. But even as some financial commentators have for years predicted chaos in the U.S. financial system resulting from soaring federal deficits, the government and the economy move forward with little disturbance. Washington, it appears, has adopted a new set of financial assumptions and they seem to be working.
The Italian government is doing something that challenges our ideas about the nature of government debt and taxation. What if governments don’t need to borrow or tax to pay their bills? In my blog post for this week read why a sovereign currency makes this possible and even desirable:
During 2008 to 2015 the ratio of GDP growth to increase in debt sank closer to 1:1. This shows that the economic policy of the time was catastrophic. There was no capacity for increasing the wages of the middle class in the USA.
At first glance it is hard to see how oil, interest rates and debt are connected. Two of them are human constructs while oil (fossil sunlight), a gift from Mother Nature, took tens of millions of years to process.
There are many who believe that the use of energy is critical to the growth of the economy. In fact, I am among these people. The thing that is not as apparent is that growth in energy consumption is dependent on the growth of debt.
In this post, I show some longer-term time series relating to energy growth, GDP growth, and debt growth–going back to 1820 in some cases–that help us understand our situation better.
The legitimacy of a given social order rests on the legitimacy of its debts.
…[T]he transfer of wealth that has been created, that has been taken from the saver and from the taxpayer to “mend the financial system” or to keep it from falling off the cliff is extraordinary.
Anyone with any sense for global economic trends ought to be worried. The signs are everywhere of a serious deflationary crisis.
