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Tag Archives: financial crisis

The capture of money

Money is a near-universal social institution. It  evolved to support human cooperation and to control and coordinate the life of humankind. Like other core institutions, such as marriage and language, the forms that money takes may differ widely. The values and norms governing money’s use, and the practices associated with it, also vary widely. For…
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10-Year retrospective: Lesson 5

5. Banking can only be reformed from within This is another unavoidable lesson. Banking has not been reformed by actions taken by the state, central banks or regulators since the crisis. Indeed they have set back the prospects for improvement. There were two main strands in the policy response to the crisis. One was monetary…
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Do central banks rely too much on economists?

If  economics is likened to a religion it is easy to see how it may be viewed as dangerous. It may blind its devotees to the claims of competing world-views. If  economists arrogantly claim that their special insight gives them the right to prescribe policy, it may provide spurious legitimacy for harmful actions. It may lead…
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How we got into the money trap – and how to get out

The world took time to get into the money trap. But with one bound it can be free. Since the 1970s governments have tried various approaches to the challenges of managing money. In the 1970s, they put full employment top. They used monetary policies to expand demand, taking risks with inflation. The results included high…
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The Ikon: the best world money

States cannot create good money. They are interested parties. A good monetary system should discipline states – i.e. hold them to account. A state-run money cannot do that. That is the flaw in proposals such as those made by Positive Money and The International Movement for Monetary Reform. (Let me add, however, that I go…
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Brexit: Britain bows to its historic adversaries

Is there any comparable case of a great country voluntarily, without any need to do so, placing itself at the mercy of its historical adversaries? That is what the UK has done. Britain’s future is now at the disposal of the remaining countries of the European Union. After being weakened by the results of the…
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Since the crisis, what has happened?

12 points: 1. Central bankers, who were by and large not responsible for supervision pre-crisis , immediately sought to pin the blame for it on regulators, diverting attention from monetary policies – stoking the credit boom, failing to sound the alarm for what they were responsible for, which often included a duty to monitor the…
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Are the chances of real reform improving?

  In The Money Trap, I argue that our problems result from the way in which we have applied a particular concept of money – the state theory of money. This dominated government policy in the 20th century. As Keynes said, all modern money is state money – it is seen as a creature of…
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Mad money: parallels with the 1970s

The current debate about monetary policies reminds me of the 1970s. Keynesian policies as then understood involved adjusting the fiscal “stance” of policy to ensure sufficient, but not excessive, effective demand. But these policies no longer had “traction”. The world was changing in ways that economists at the time struggled to understand.  Money was becoming…
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Wolf of the City

Martin Wolf’s recent radio programme – “How Low can Rates Go?” – described and illustrated the dilemmas facing monetary policy-makers. Nine years from the start of the great financial crisis, Wolf reported, economies had still not returned to “normal”.  Capitalism was perceived by many to be failing to deliver; globalisation a con trick.  The political…
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