“Talk about centralisation! The credit system, which has its focus in the so-called national banks and the big money-lenders and usurers surrounding them, constitutes enormous centralisation, and gives this class of parasites the fabulous power, not only to periodically despoil industrial capitalists, but also to interfere in actual production in a [...]

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I’ve just been interviewed for an SBS News piece on China (for non-Australian readers, SBS is Australia’s multicultural television station, and its news has a strong international focus).
Ordinarily I don’t comment on China, because I don’t know enough about their economy right now–except to deride the belief that was popular in Australia last year that [...]

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Ordinarily I’d simply post a link to a media report in either my Gems or Brickbats page. But this quote from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer shows that he really understands what is going on now, in a way that no other person in authority seems to have done as yet. The full report can be [...]

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I have just moved the blog to a new ISP after my previous provider IXWebhosting proved to have intractable problems with malware.
The new hosting is being provided pro bono by Cyanide Web Hosting, which I greatly appreciate.
Some posts may have been lost in the process, but that was preferable to putting up with a site [...]

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Note: This post has been modified ni the light of comments that the initial version quoted Bernanke out of context.
A link to this blog from a US legal advisory website the Practising Law Institute’s In Brief ( “DEFLATION IN THE REAL WORLD“) reminded me of  Bernanke’s book Essays on the Great Depression, which I’ve been aware of [...]

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One blog participant brought a post by George Monbiot to my attention. I frequently comment that the financial regime initiated after WWII omitted key ideas that Keynes proposed–in particular, a new currency for international trade and controls on the behaviour of surplus nations as well as those running deficits. Monbiot provides the historic detail of these [...]

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It had to happen: neoclassical economists are now advising that the anticipated recession will be much milder if only workers would accept wage cuts.
When I saw this crisis was imminent in December 2005, one major factor that motivated me to go public with my analysis was the certainty that, when the crisis hit, neoclassical economists [...]

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This is getting a bit like Star Wars, but I promise–this will be the last post in this series. In the previous two, I constructed a model of a pure credit economy in which the money supply and economic activity can expand smoothly of time.
Of course, that’s not the real world. As we know from [...]

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In the previous post, I outlined my basic model of a pure credit economy, in which a single initial loan allowed a continous flow of economic activity (at a constant level) over time. The basic flowtable of that system was:
 

Type
1
-1
-1
-1

Account
Firm Loan (FL)
Firm Deposit (FD)
Bank Deposit (BD)
Worker Deposit (WD)

Interest on Loan
+A
 
 
 

Interest on Deposit
 
+B
-B
 

Pay Interest on Loan
-C
-C
+C
 

Pay Wages
 
-D
 
+D

Interest [...]

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