January 16th, 2010
15th January, 2009.
Patient readers this blog is triggered by Jeff Randall’s column in the Daily Telegraph today.
In it he inadvertently discloses the identity of the puppet-masters dictating the Tory political agenda around public spending cuts.
In a somewhat histrionic column in which he describes the public deficit as a ‘disaster’ ( he should mind his language: Haiti’s earthquake is a disaster) Randall quotes a piece of ‘research’ by the French bank, Société Générale. The paper is titled “Popular Delusions” and its authors explain some simple facts about government spending cuts to Telegraph readers:
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January 9th, 2010
8th January, 2009
This piece appeared on the Guardian’s Comment site:
“Today the people of Iceland, a country whose population, at 317,000, is somewhat smaller than Leicester’s, are required by the British political, financial and economic establishment to carry the full burden of the losses suffered by Landsbanki’s depositor programme Icesave.
We consider this to be unfair, for the following reasons.
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January 7th, 2010
5th January, 2010
Sorry about the delay in posting, but this is my latest blog for the Huffington Post.
“One is president of a country of about 300,000 people — Iceland — a country about the size of Virginia, President Olafur R. Grimsson. The second is president of a country of about 300,000,000 people, the United States. President Obama.
Both their presidencies have been scarred by the financial crisis. Both have had to balance the interests of their people against the interests of their bankers.
President Obama has allowed that balance to tilt in favor of the bankers.
President Grimsson yesterday took a stand against bankers and international creditors, including the British and Dutch governments.
Instead, he stood up to defend the interests of his people.
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December 10th, 2009
 9th December, 2009
It has been an extraordinary day this day, and something to witness: this frenzy of pre-election fisticuffs.
Extraordinary because Conservatives, like mindless bullies, are fighting a phoney war against the victims of this crisis.
The fact is the Tories are spineless scaredy cats, too timid to take on the perpetrators, who have successfully bribed them with various inducements, including the playground’s shiniest marbles.
As a result they have turned away from the perpetrators, and are picking on nurses, policemen, teachers, civil servants, Alzheimer-carers, school cooks, hospital cleaners and psychiatrists – to categorise but a few.
All these victims of the financial crisis now stand accused – by the Tories and their friends - of pillaging Treasury coffers of £250 billion – the rise in government debt since this crisis started in 2007.
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December 6th, 2009
 6th December, 2009.
Most economists (who should know better) confuse the government’s budget deficit with total government debt.
The distinction really is important.
Mixing them up is a little like confusing stocks and flows. Or confusing your outstanding mortgage – say £200,000 – with your monthly debt repayments. They are quite different things, and if you were to lose your job, the flows (paid with your salary) come to a halt, and then it’s the stock – the £200,000 – that really matters.
Furthermore it is quite possible to increase your mortgage – and lower your monthly payments. Many did this in the boom years of mortgage re-financing. Or even to decrease your mortgage and increase your monthly payments.
So, just as the movements in regular mortgage payments tell us little about the outstanding stock of debt, so government deficits tell us little about the stock of debt invested and the stock of debt outstanding.
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In the September 2003 edition of openDemocracy I wrote:
Click here to read the full story in openDemocracy
BOOKS:
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