3D View: Debt, Deleverage and Definancialisation
It’s taken me a long time to get round to this post. My eyes have been glued to the train wreck that is European fiscal management. Who could forget the financial gymnastics performed by many EU...
View ArticleLeverage: The Silent Assassin
One of the greatest financial inventions is leverage: the ability to create an asset of value in excess of your original investment. Simply put this is how you can buy a house with no deposit or a...
View ArticleThe Big Short and The Big Fraud
Time for a book review. I’ve just finished Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short”. It’s an amazing book, not just because it informs us of the road to the subprime mess but he creates a story around the...
View ArticlePayback: When the Debt Collector Calls
We live in interesting times. Interesting in that we are slowly realising that we have spent way beyond our budget: in monetary terms of course but also ecological. We are consuming ecological...
View ArticleBasel III: Again and Again and Again…Maneuvre
So Basel III is finally with us…….phew……can’t wait for Basel IV. I’m not sure about a fifth one as that really would be a joke too far but then again if we can have a Rocky and Rambo V why not Basel V?...
View ArticleDinosaur Economics: Bill English loads up more debt
Bill English, the NZ Finance Minister, has predictably gone for the traditional response when considering how to pay for the rebuilding of post-quake Christchurch: he wants to borrow $10bln and add...
View ArticleSystem Cure: Monetary Dialysis
Slowly but surely mainstream commentators, economists and policy analysts are all starting to realise that exponential debt is the core of our current economic malaise. This is great news to those of...
View ArticleLiving Within our Limits
I was asked recently to give a talk to a small but distinguished group on “how to survive the global financial and ecological crises”. Easy uh! Well you have to start somewhere and have a rough idea of...
View ArticleTo Print or Not to Print?
“To be, or not to be, that is the question, Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end...
View ArticleThe Great Transformation: Addendum
Karl Polanyi began his famous 1944 treatise, “The Great Transformation”, with the following words: “Nineteenth-century civilization has collapsed. This book is concerned with the political and economic...
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