David A. Jones (Guest Author)

Our Magic Money Tree: Fixing The Financial Crisis

25 March, 2013
  "There is no magic money tree." -- David Cameron, UK Prime Minister Regular readers of this website will be well aware that David Cameron is quite wrong here. In fact, creating money is as easy as the flick of a pen and the clattering of some computer keys. While the UK's "magic money tree" [...]

Money and Ecology

9 January, 2013
"Debts are subject to the laws of mathematics rather than physics. Unlike wealth, which is subject to the laws of thermodynamics, debts do not rot with old age and are not consumed in the process of living. On the contrary, they grow at so much per cent per annum, by the well-known mathematical laws of [...]

Does Angela Merkel Know Where Money Comes From?

25 May, 2012
When you create your money supply as interest-bearing debt, you basically have two options: A:- Have more money, but also more debt. B:- Have less debt, but also less money. To solve a debt crisis, we would like to have an option C:- more money and less debt. Unfortunately, in the absence of the sorts [...]

Why Student Debt? What Can We Do about It?

9 May, 2012
  A lot of students like me (and a lot of people in general) are opposed to tuition fees and the coalition government's decision to dramatically increase them next year. This is not merely for selfish reasons. In my view, tuition fees are bad news chiefly because they turn university from an education into an [...]

'Fiat money' or Gold Standard?

14 March, 2012
Many people, upon first learning about 'Fractional Reserve' Banking, are drawn to the idea of the Gold Standard. They find out that 'Fractional Reserve' Banking leads to an inflating money supply, moreover one plagued by cycles of boom and bust due to its elasticity. They dislike this - they want money to work as a [...]

Do Banks Lend Money?

24 February, 2012
  It might seem strange to ask the question "do banks lend money?" (although perhaps not to readers of this blog!) After all, we are reminded every day that they do, with terms such as "bank loan", headlines like "UK bank lending to shrink in 2012" and government policies to "get the banks lending again" [...]

No Reason to Suffer Through Austerity

26 October, 2011
There’s been an awful lot of mainstream media analysis of the Greek debt crisis, with most economic “experts” incessantly arguing for the necessity of austerity and the apocalypse that will befall us all if Greece defaults. Rather than add to this I want to ask some different questions, like why countries such as Greece have [...]

Rethinking Economic Growth

8 October, 2011
  I recently read Manfred Max-Neef and Philip B. Smith’s book Economics Unmasked. Its first half is an interesting critique on economic orthodoxy, its second is packed with ideas for positive social changes. I want to discuss Max-Neef’s “Threshold Hypothesis” here, but first I need to talk about economic indicators in general and more specifically [...]

A Breath of Fresh Air in Conference on Banking

3 October, 2011
  I recently attended the free public session of The European Conference on Banking and the Economy (with the tagline "Banking: seeking a new paradigm") hosted at Winchester, birthplace of the English tally stick system. The two main speakers at the free public session were Lord Adair Turner (both Financial Services Authority and Committee on [...]