Scandal in the City
8 February, 2011A scandal is taking place in the City, and I don't mean the scandal that takes place every day by allowing the sector to create our entire money supply and loan it to us. This scandal involves leverage of a different kind. Specifically the excuses being made by the big banks to pull out of [...]
It's Bonus Time!
13 January, 2011It's bonus time in the City again this year, the Champagne bars will be pleased. But what about the rest of us? LLoyds TSB, 41% owned by the taxpayer, are paying their CEO Eric Daniels £2million this year. Needless to say the ethics of this are highly dubious, and we are in fact advocating that [...]
£6bn from you, £7bn for me
8 December, 2010Interesting snippets of information have come to light in the previous few days. Banks are charging the highest ever rates for overdrafts in this country, a facility many of us need due to the recent crisis. 19% is the standard in this day and age, which is approximately 38 times the base rate set by [...]
Positive Money's Student Conference
17 November, 2010After a long and demanding weekend of incredibly interesting presentations from our speakers I'm glad to say our first conference, Banking Shapes The World, was a huge success. We sold out 130 tickets well in advance, making it the largest monetary reform conference ever held. The first day, with representatives from the Cobden Centre, Positive [...]
Douglas Carswell MP's Bill – Full Text
17 November, 2010Douglas Carswell's Private members bill has been published by the House of Commons, and can be read in its original form on the link below. The second reading of the bill is due to occur this Friday (19th November) in the House of Commons. Download the bill here: Financial Services (Regulation of Deposits and Lending) [...]
The State of the Campaign
4 November, 2010We're now six weeks into the Positive Money campaign, and we've made some great progress, the past two weeks marking several important milestones both for Positive Money and the Monetary Reform movement in general. Since our launch we have: 2,000 supporters 5,000 hits a month on the website, including 3,500 unique visitors The largest Monetary [...]
Mervyn King – "Of all the many ways of organising banking, the worst is the one we have today."
27 October, 2010Mervyn King presented himself several times as broadly in favour of radical redesigns of the banking system. In his speech in New York in October 2010, Banking: from Bagehot to Basel, and back again the Governor of the Bank of England asked "What lessons can we draw from recent and current experience to update Bagehot's [...]
Democratising Money, from the New Economics Foundation
5 October, 2010Josh Ryan-Collins from the leading independent economic think-tank, the New Economics Foundation, has written a very good article on the nature of the current banking system, questioning the way we think about money and the system we should decide to use, and he also presents an introduction to a range of alternatives. This article, copied below, is [...]
Independent Commission on Banking Considers Real Monetary Reform
26 September, 2010Another significant point in history happened on Friday 24th September. The Independent Commission on banking released a report containing sections on the "Issues" with the current banking system, sadly missing was the fact that banks are allowed to profit from the privatised creation of money as debt. However, and this an extremely significant "however", proposals from Lawrence Kotlikoff [...]