However, having an open free-for-all which anyone could attend would, whilst technically possible, be immensely difficult to manage, because we are aware that such events often attract trolls who are abusive, not least in the comments that they post while live-casts are running. We do not see any reason for suffering the stress of managing such a situation, and so instead we are looking to record more controlled events.
Do not, ever, allow the Sage to be questioned.
Only government can issue currency because only government can tax to maintain the value of that currency.
First, the creation of money must always be a matter of public trust. Stablecoins are, by definition, privately issued claims on supposedly safe assets.
Private money must be banned because it might work.
Second, and vitally, money is not a private commodity. It is a public institution, representing a social contract guaranteed by the state. When private corporations create quasi-currencies, they are in effect privatising part of that social contract. They want to capture the benefits of issuing money without accepting any of the public responsibilities that accompany it.
Or is it because private money might have value without it being taxed to produce that value?
Darwin’s theory of evolution is one of the most influential ideas in human history. But what if the story we have told about it is wrong, or, more precisely, incomplete?
The popular interpretation of Darwin’s work suggests that the world is driven by the survival of the fittest. Yet what if it is really driven by the survival of the wisest, who are those who cooperate and not compete to adapt and endure?
Humans are, in fact, remakably cooperative animals. Look outside the window and see what millennia of cooperation have built – a vast civilisation of unparallelled richness.
Markets, we are told, reward the strong, the clever, and the efficient.
Markets are how people cooperate. Who am I going to cooperate with in my Rincewindian quest for potatoes? Mr Aldi or Mr Lidl? Come along now, by definition a market transaction is a cooperation. They even gave a Nobel to Ronald Coase for explaining types and forms of cooperation in Theory of the Firm.
Sigh.
Democracy should always rule.
The selection of the head of state should be by merit and by winning a mandate.
Hereditary entitlement to rule in Britain should end.
The guardrails protecting this country from abuse by those governing it should be reinforced by a proper constitution, as the USA clearly also now needs, because that which it has is no longer working for it..
Protest against the monarchy in the UK also needs support. I am a member of Republic. Give it a look.
Monarchy as against democracy. Hmm.
Anyone think Kaiser Bill would have allowed an Austrian corporal to take power? And do not forget that it was the King of Italy who fired Benito.
Prem Sikka is showing that being a deluded bluffer is no bar so where’s mine?
Why are Britain’s politicians so hopeless? From Tory fantasists to Labour deniers, Westminster has driven out the talented, the imaginative and the honest.
First, the 2% inflation target is not a law of nature. It is a political choice, invented in the 1990s as part of the neoliberal settlement that handed power from elected governments to supposedly independent central banks. The figure has no theoretical or empirical basis. It was chosen because it sounded reassuringly low, not because it optimised real economic outcomes.
Second, the 2% target assumes inflation is always bad and price stability is always good. But in an economy beset by shocks, whether from pandemics, wars, climate disruptions, supply chain fragility, and shifting trade patterns, modest inflation can be a sign of adaptation and resilience. It reflects adjustment to new costs, and is not necessarily a failure of policy.
We all took on board Keynes’s observation that people don’t mind – not so much at least – falls in real wages but they absolutely hate, hate, hate, falls in nominal wages. But there always will be corners of the economy that are in decline as other corners rise. We therefore desire – even insist upon – wages in some corners declining in real terms so as to tease labour out of them and into expanding areas. We want buggy whip making salaries to deceline in real terms even as we desire car mechanic wages to rise.
A 2% inflation rate allows those – gentle, over time – real wage declines in shrinking sectors while avoiding nominal wage cuts. That’s the whole friggin’ point.
And of course this is even worse:
Second, the government hides behind the Bank’s “independence” to avoid taking responsibility for economic management. Fiscal policy, which is the one tool capable of addressing real-world inflation pressures through investment, infrastructure, and fair taxation, is sidelined.
If monetary policy is taken away from the politicians then the only set of policy tools the politicians have is fiscal policy. By removing monetary policy from the politicians we therefore *increase* not sideline the salience of fiscal policy.
There is one more thought of course. Given the buggery politicians are making of fiscal policy what’s the support to giving them monetary policy they can also fuck up?
Life is a self-organising, dissipative system characterised by the flow of electrons and protons through an electromagnetic field.
Script A Quantum of Solanum
Daniel Craig booked to star as the Sage of Ely.
The proposal I have made for 15 or so years now is simple. I have suggested that around a quarter of all new pension contributions and all new ISA savings should be invested in public-purpose funds to form the capital that might be used for investment in new infrastructure, green energy generation, social housing, local authority renewal, flood defences, climate adaptation and for other social purposes. That could be done through a National Investment Bank or similar institution, accountable to Parliament but managed on professional lines. The government could issue new classes of long-term, low-risk bonds designed for this purpose, giving savers both a fair return and the satisfaction of knowing that their money is doing something useful.
Weren’t the “green bonds” to pay a “high” interest rate of 1%?
Economists love the idea of perfect competition. If you are now a professional economist, working in a university, and you want to get an academic paper published, you have to basically assume that the world runs on the basis of what economists call perfect competition.
How crazed is the man getting?
Isn’t it now apparent that the reason why inflation is embedded in the UK economy is precisely because we have interest rates that are too high
There’s been some pruning of the Spud blog. All the old comments from back in hte day when people were allowed to disagree seem to have gone….
Economics, like physics before Einstein, has long believed the world behaves according to simple, linear rules. It assumes equilibrium, perfect information, and frictionless exchange.
For economics assumes none of those three things.
There are models where one, two or even all three are assumed in order to be able to look at some other influence, sure.
But, say, frictionless exchange. This was 50% of a Nobel:
The theorem states that if the provision of a good or service results in an externality and trade in that good or service is possible, then bargaining will lead to a Pareto efficient outcome regardless of the initial allocation of property. A key condition for this outcome is that there are sufficiently low transaction costs in the bargaining and exchange process. This ‘theorem’ is commonly attributed to Nobel Prize laureate Ronald Coase.
In practice, numerous complications, including imperfect information and poorly defined property rights, can prevent this optimal Coasean bargaining solution. In his 1960 paper,[1] Coase specified the ideal conditions under which the theorem could hold and then also argued that real-world transaction costs are rarely low enough to allow for efficient bargaining. Hence, the theorem is almost always inapplicable to economic reality but is a useful tool in predicting possible economic outcomes.
A Nobel awarded for pointing out that frictions exist in exchange means that the subject assumes frictionless exchange.
Ho Well.
No one sensible is in party politics these days. I am not in party politics.
You can see the conclusion being reached, can’t you?
Slightly to my surprise, given that Asian markets fell overnight, the FTSE 100 has opened flat this morning.
So far, markets seem to have shrugged off the crypto collapse over the weekend.
I warned that was possible.
It does not mean tha the correction is not coming. I think that is inevitable.
There is a fundamental distinction that we have forgotten in how we now think about the economy. It is the difference between work and speculation, which is, in quantum terms, the difference between what is real work and activity that is reversible.
Try reversing a specultion gone wrong and getting your money back.
Also, this from hte guy who insists that we face uncertainty, not just risk. The answer to uncertainty is speculation, of course. Well, if this happens then that – and we don’t know – then we could react by doing this other. We are speculating on what might happen.
Of course SpudMeister insists that we should react to the existence of uncertainty by planning.
Sigh.
Right-wing commentators claim inequality in Britain is falling. It isn’t.
The Office for National Statistics says the Gini coefficient has improved — but the truth is that it ignores capital gains, wealth accumulation, debt, and inflation that hits the poor hardest.
Given that wealth inequality is also at worst static, if not actually falling, something must be done to deny reality, right? Because how can you justify nicking everything if there’s no justification for doing so?
Adding 3p to the basic and higher rates of income tax would be less harmful than ramping up VAT, corporation tax, or a raft of smaller taxes, the institute said.
So says NIESR. Spud:
But then let’s play along with the question NIESR has set. If Reeves believes she must raise taxes, and she clearly does, for political and institutional reasons, the real issue is not whether to raise them, but who should pay.
OK, then Spud goes on to his wishlist. Ignoring the actual point NIESR make:
The graph below shows the effect on real GDP of a permanent rise in the three taxes we
consider. Although all taxes lead to lower economic growth, the impact varies between tax
options chosen. VAT has the biggest negative impact; real GDP falls by 0.87 per cent in the first
year after the tax is applied. Corporation tax has the second largest impact, with real GDP lower
by approximately 0.15 per cent. Income tax, on the other hand, has the lowest impact, with real
GDP being lower by approximately 0.05 per cent.VAT is particularly damaging in the short term,
but once the economy adjusts to the higher prices, real GDP stabilises. Corporation tax, on the
other hand, has less of a short-term impact but is more persistent and starts to drag down the
economy in the longer term.
Taxes have deadweight costs. We should raise our money – or for MMTers, reduce our inflation by – low deadweight, nothigh deadweight, taxes.
But then Spud’s whole taxing wealth report itself valiantly ignores deadweights. Because of course it does, all Spud’s reports ignore the very point that needs to be discussed. Obviously.
The first is that she will abolish stamp duty. The aim, she says, is to help young people buy homes. What she has very clearly never done is look at the data on what the impact of changes to stamp duty have on house prices. Almost invariably, cutting stamp duty results in an increase in house prices.
So cutting stamp duty on shares will increase share prices and so increase investment.
The case against the Financial Transactions Tax is proven……
People keep asking me the question, “What if the UK openly adopted modern monetary theory? Would markets panic and run? Suppose they did. What would happen then?” people say to me, and what I want to show is that if they did, and I don’t think they would, that panic could be turned into a plan to build a stronger Britain.