Adair Turner on the Politics of Finance on BBC Radio 4
25 February, 2014Tom Sutcliffe discusses money with the American economist Charles Calomiris, who looks back at the history of financial disasters and argues that they're caused more by government failures, than individual bankers. The former head of the Financial Services Authority, Adair Turner, might agree on the need for structural changes, but famously said 'heads should roll' [...]
Some Further Thoughts on QE
18 July, 2013Between March 2009 and July 2012, through the program known as Quantitative Easing (QE), £375bn of newly created money has been spent by the Bank of England (BoE) to buy UK gilts, mainly from non-banks such as pension funds and insurance companies, institutions that together constitute much of the gilts market. Over the same time [...]
Monetary Reform, Government Spending and National Borrowing
24 June, 2013Post monetary reform, as we at PM advocate, only the publicly owned institution, the UK Monetary Creation Committee, will be allowed to issue new national money. A related matter, but one on which, as far as I know, PM does not hold a definite position, is that of national borrowing. Post reform, should national borrowing [...]
Could We Accelerate the Post Reform Transition?
15 April, 2013If we had UK monetary reform tomorrow then the nation would still owe over £1 trillion pounds to its gilt holders and the government would still have commitments to spending programs and interest payments which together exceed tax revenues by approximately £120 billion pounds per year. Post reform the government could immediately stop further borrowing, but [...]
QE – one step closer to monetary reform?
6 April, 2013When the BoE spends, for example, £10bn of newly created QE money to buy gilts from non-banks, both the central bank money and the commercial bank credit money aggregates increase in tandem by £10bn. All else equal, our money supply increases with no corresponding increase in commercial bank debt. QE money is thus publicly issued, [...]
Some Thoughts on QE
22 January, 2013As Ben Dyson notes in his submission to the Treasury Committee on QE, Mervyn King is rather vague about exactly how the QE money enters into general circulation. One possible but politically sensitive explanation is that the pension funds and insurance companies in receipt of the QE money promptly use that money to buy newly [...]
Reverse Auctions – a Mechanism for Flexibility of Publicly Issued Money
7 August, 2012One of the principal criticisms of a debt-free, publicly issued money supply is that it is inflexible and incapable of responding to rapid growth and the consequent increase in the demand for money in the general economy. If growth of the money supply can happen only through public issuance and direct public spending into the [...]
No More National Debt
17 May, 2012The following passage was written by me for Bill Still’s book No More National Debt. I thank Bill for his permission to reproduce it here, slightly edited for clarity. To see more clearly the fundamental difference between the current system of debt-based, commercially issued money and our proposed system of debt-free, publicly issued [...]
"What is Money?" on BBC Radio 4
28 March, 2012At 20:30 on Monday 26 March the BBC broadcast on Radio 4 a half-hour programme intriguingly entitled What Is Money? As I write it is still available on BBC iplayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01dtlzn/Analysis_What_Is_Money/ The broadcaster Frances Stonor Saunders posed this fundamental question and invited comments from various people including writers John Lanchester, author of Whoops!: why [...]