Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is a publicly-owned bank. The overwhelming majority of its shares are in state hands, 73% of the equity. Yet it was the only major bank to fail outright the recent ‘stress test’ of its balance sheet conducted by the Bank of England. The bank is a basket-case. It is costing […]
Posts under ‘Finance’
Britain’s problem: Philip Green is the archetype British capitalist
Apr 26th, 2016 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.On global capitalism in Lenin’s day, the Bolshevik leader had this to say: “Imperialism is an immense accumulation of money capital in a few countries … hence the extraordinary growth of a class, or rather, of a stratum of rentiers, i.e., people who live by “clipping coupons”, who take no part in any enterprise whatever, […]
Labour, John McDonnell and the New Economics
Mar 13th, 2016 by David Pavett.Once the surprise and the shock of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader had sunk in, many (including me) became impatient for policy initiatives and membership involvement in policy formation to come to the fore. Clearly cutting through media hostility is a major task but I find it difficult to see that more could not […]
Numb and number: where the Big Short falls short
Mar 2nd, 2016 by Ann Pettifor.As this goes to press, global capital markets appear to be stabilizing after another period of intense, and scary stock market volatility. This set the context for the arrival in Britain of Adam McKay’s The Big Short – a film about the American sub-prime mortgage meltdown, based on the book by Michael Lewis. It could […]
Bank regulation 8 years on, why has next to nothing been done?
Oct 8th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.The real root problem with regulating the banks is that the politicians are hand in glove with them. The Tories don’t even want to regulate the finance sector so long as it provides them with half their annual income year after year, not just the banks themselves, but the hedge fund billionaires as well. Worse […]
Now they’re aiming to go back to non-prime mortgage securities which caused crash
Sep 10th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.If you want evidence of how reckless and desperate bankers and investors have now become in search of higher yields, look no further than the widespread decision to return to a variant of the mortgage-backed securities which precipitated the 2008-9 crash. Then it was sub-prime securities which were knowingly sold to households handicapped by low […]
Corbynomics and crashes: investment versus speculation
Sep 3rd, 2015 by Michael Burke.Words matter. But in economic discussion as elsewhere they are frequently abused. In economic commentary one of the most frequent falsehoods is to describe speculative activity as investment. Stock market ‘investors’ are in fact engaged in speculative activity. There is no value created by this speculation. The claim made by its apologists that it provides […]
Ending ‘life support’ for western economic model underlies China crisis
Sep 2nd, 2015 by Ann Pettifor.After two days of trouble and strife in global stock markets, the Federal Reserve’s New York President William Dudley said in remarks to reporters that a September interest rate hike seemed “less compelling” now than in recent weeks. These two words alone calmed global financial markets, and pushed up the price of oil. So everything’s […]
The justification for Corbynomics goes far beyond re-nationalisation
Aug 26th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.It is curious that the main charge thrown against Jeremy Corbyn – apart from all the bluster and hysteria – is that his policies lack ‘economic credibility’. The assumption presumably is that the economic policies pursued by UK governments, both Labour and Tory, as well as by the EU, were sufficiently credible and rewarding as […]
Why the Euro is the gold standard writ large…
Aug 23rd, 2015 by Ann Pettifor.The euro not only replicated key elements of the gold standard – but went much further: European currencies were simply abolished. States lost control over both their currency and their central bank. Parallels with the operation of the gold standard explain why, like the gold standard, the euro will fail. The euro system denies monetary […]