So what really happens in commercial banking? You might find it quite interesting...

By ignoring debt, and thinking magically about economic growth and the operation of markets, the mainstream of economists and politicians have wrecked havoc on the UK economy. We now collectively owe so much that if the net worth of the UK was cashed up and used to pay off private-sector debt, there would be a £2 trillion shortfall. This level of debt is not neutral in an economy. We need a rational approach to private debt.

James Robertson has been described as the ‘grandfather of green economics’; he might equally be called the father of Renegade Economics: over the last three decades nobody has been more eloquent or straightforward in their advocacy of a new economic order.
 

Ooh, a banking enquiry. Bob Diamond's geezers will be quaking in their Guccis.

I have a question that has been bugging me for a while and it seems to me that economists, with over 200 years of scholarship behind you, should really be equipped to answer...

For economics nerds like me the last week has been riveting. Paul Krugman, a Nobel-prizewinning member of the economics establishment, has been debating with Steve Keen, a radical who’s long argued that the conventional economics taught in universities is woefully unrealistic because it ignores important features of the real world like uncertainty, the role of banks, debt and how money is created.

The Exchanghibition Bank’s 2012 banknote is not just about financial exchange: In order to acquire a 2012 banknote money alone won’t be enough, our customers will also need to provide us with their Idea for Change.

I first published this short series of essays in 1992/93. They were a response to the catastrophic application of the tenets of Monetarism to the British economy, the resultant unemployment and social dislocation, the consequences of which persist even now. Much of their content is a criticism on Monetarism, the economic theory postulated by its architect and chief advocate, Milton Friedman.

The modern financial economy is based upon thinking that amounts to little more than the delusions of the medieval alchemists.

Last week the European Central Bank (ECB) injected another €530bn into the banking system through something that is called LTRO (Long Term Refinancing Operation).