About: robert

  Caveat: I should mention to begin with that this critique is based on Lord Turner’s paper  on “Escaping the Debt Addiction”; one paper cannot cover every area and he has (I understand) written a soon-to-be-published book that will presumably range more widely.   The approach in this paper can be compared with that developed…
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  As argued in the post “Regime Uncertainty Undermines Confidence”, only a new policy regime, not changes to individual policy areas (such as regulatory policy) will reduce the existential angst that is crippling business and over-shadowing the recovery. New money….. It should establish a global currency standard. The standard should be sufficiently attractive that countries…
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  The attributes of gold usually cited as making it useful as money are summed up by the World Gold Council as follows:   “Gold’s scarcity, the fact that it does not corrode or tarnish, its malleability and status across civilisations have made it eminently suitable as a form of money.”   There is more…
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    Markets and banks are kept afloat not so much by past QE but by the expectation that central banks will double up on it if markets should collapse again. Have asset prices become de facto the new monetary standard?  From a longer-term perspective, and contrary to conventional wisdom, this could be a move…
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    In this week’s FT Money (25/26 January) , Merryn Somerset Webb, editor-in-chief, has some interesting remarks on banking. She points out that customers have new, and often better, ways to borrow than “via the traditional fleecing machines with their pricey real estate and unreliable IT systems”. There are new entrants to the market,…
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