NEF's Response to the Vicker's Commission
12 April, 2011Josh Ryan-Collins, one of the co-authors of our submission to the Independent Commission on Banking, has written on the NEF blog about the need for the ICB to 'get the basics of banking right'. He writes: "You won't find too many who will disagree with the regulatory rule of thumb that 'if it isn't going [...]
Osborne's Budget – A Critique (Guest Post by Ronald Rankin)
30 March, 2011Ronald Rankin writes with the following critical review of George Osborne's budget. Note that these are Ron's views, and don't necessarily represent those of Positive Money as an organisation, but there are some pertinent points below: Some people who are members of the Conservative Party received a personal letter from George Osborne, explaining some of [...]
"Time to Halt this 'Insane' System" – Sheffield Telegraph
16 March, 2011Sheffield Telegraph recently published the following letter from Peter Verity (see the full scan of the letter here): "Many explanations have been given for what triggered the recent ‘credit boom’ and ‘credit crunch’, such as sub-prime lending and international trade imbalances. However, the root cause is surely the nature of credit itself. "How do the [...]
Lib-Dem Conference: Banking Reforms Not Enough
14 March, 2011Peter Verity reports from the Lib Dem Spring conference in Sheffield: The Liberal-Democrat conference has said that government banking reforms do not go far enough. An emergency motion on banking reform was debated today (13/3/11) at the Lib-Dem spring conference in Sheffield, and they agreed that "Project Merlin" does not go far enough. While we [...]
References for Oxford Uni Debate on Future of Banking
4 March, 2011Here are the references that I refer to in the Oxford University panel debate on the Future of Banking: Our Reform Proposals Our submission to the government's Independent Commission on Banking can be found here. Does Mervyn King Support Full-Reserve Banking? It appears so, although he has to be diplomatic given his position. His original [...]
The Positive Money Office – Photos
1 March, 2011We've taken on a small(ish) office near Angel in London so that we can grow the campaign. We spent yesterday shifting boxes and getting things set up - you can see the result here: [youtube id='146PjqJ6GM8' autoplay='no' height='480' width='600'] Having this base is going to help us make the campaign much more effective. We've got [...]
NEWS: New Office/Hub for the Campaign
20 February, 2011The campaign is expanding quickly, and it's already beyond the point where myself and Ben Curtis can handle everything, even when our working hours are 'all of them'! So it's time to expand the campaign. What we need is a hub for anyone who wants to work on the wider campaign for a banking system [...]
Positive Money at Oxford University Roundtable Discussion
20 February, 2011In two weeks, on Friday 4th March we'll be speaking at a roundtable discussion at Oxford University. Fellow panelists will include Angela Knight of the British Bankers' Association and Professor David Miles of the Bank of England. [yellowbox]Members of the public are welcome to attend the event.[/yellowbox] Full details are below: A Roundtable Discussion on [...]
NEF: Taxpayers Subsidising Banks by £30bn a Year
16 February, 2011This briefing from the New Economic Foundation finds that banks are being conservatively subsidised by up to £30bn a year. They point out a few hidden subsidies that banks receive: Being too big to fail Quantitative easing Passing the costs of re-capitalisation onto the customer The licence to digitally 'print' money (This is touched on [...]