ALB
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So much do banks need deposits from savers that they compete with each other to attract them. They also compete for ordinary deposits on which they pay no interest as they can lend this money too. If banks really could create money “out of thin air” by a “pen stroke” then they wouldn’t need to.
Note that “net interest income” is not the sane as profits. It’s a bank’s income. A bank’s profits are this less their costs (buildings, wages, computer systems, etc).
Found a way to read that article in the Sunday Mail here:
The figures are different from those in the i paper — they are for six banks not seven, but even for those in common they are not the same. But the definition of “net interest income” is the same:
“the difference between what the companies charge borrowers for loans and mortgages and what is paid to savers in interest”.
Which they give as £44 billion, £8 billion more than in 2021.
In any event, both papers take it for granted that banks are financial intermediaries, borrowing money at one rate to lend at a higher one. Not, as one of those who commented claimed, companies that “magically make money with a pen stroke” and then lend it — if that was the case their income would be much, much higher as they wouldn’t have to pay anything to savers since they wouldn’t need any.
I couldn’t read that article as you had to subscribe but it was the same in yesterday’s i paper under the headline “Banks rake in £4.8bn extra profits in ‘appalling rip-off’”. The article compared the “net interest income” from seven high street banks in 2022 compared with 2021, explaining
“Net interest income is the profit made by banks from charging higher interest borrowing costs on mortgages and loans, compared to what they pay out in interest on savings accounts.”
In other words, banks generate an income by borrowing at one rate of interest and lending at a higher rate, their profits being what is left after paying their running costs.
A table shows that between them the seven banks did have a “net interest income” higher by £4.8 billion in 2022 than in 2021. No doubt that would have been mainly due to not raising the interest rate paid to savers at the same time as they raised the rate they charged lenders (following an increase in the Bank rate).
But the total figures are also revealing. In 2021 their net interest was £27,998,000,000. In 2022 it was £32,761,000,000. The point is that there is no claim or pretence here that this was created out of thin air. It is clearly stated that it comes “from charging higher interest borrowing costs on mortgages and loans, compared to what they pay out in interest on savings accounts.”
“Since I was a child, I have always had many Jewish friends. They say that Zelensky is not Jewish, but a disgrace to the Jewish people.” (Putin)
https://tass.com/politics/1634177
I wonder what he thinks of Macron and Blinken who also support a regime he considers Nazi?
I hadn’t realised that she had taken up an anti-Russia stance right from the start. That’s understandable in the sense of condemning any side that starts a war. But to say, a year and a half later, that the Russian attack on Ukraine was “unprovoked” is another matter. It is taking sides.
What was going on before Russia invaded was that both Russia and NATO were provoking each other in the course of which the West called Russia’s bluff. . .
She has also taken the Ukrainian line that Russia blew up that dam. But we don’t know yet who did or what really happened. Even some pro-NATO commentators are withholding judgment. Apparently she knows better.
She could have taken the more cautious approach taken in this article, but she hasn’t:
https://www.leftvoice.org/sabotaged-dam-in-ukraine-a-reactionary-act-no-matter-the-culprit/
Further evidence that Greta has taken the NATO side in the current NATO-Russia war in Ukraine:
She’s now completely discredited.
More grist for the mill. This revealing remark by a Labourite spin-doctor to columnist Patrick Maguire in the Times on Monday;
“Which party’s manifesto will look most like 2016 Vote Leave and 2019 Tory offer?” one of Starmer’s closes aides put it to me last week. “It’s ours”
Of course it doesn’t matter what the politicians promise as while they propose, Capitalism disposes, and, once in office, they can only react to whatever the workings of the capitalist world economy throw at them.
Won’t it rather be the other way round, ie more surplus value as it grows being diverted into unproductive (of more surplus value) activities rather than the growth of these putting pressure on surplus value? Or maybe that’s just saying the thing from a different angle.
This was also discussed in two book reviews on the February 2021 Socialist Standard. Both authors reach the same conclusion that the increased productivity brought about by automation has not resulted either in more for everyone nor in mass unemployment but in more low paid and precarious jobs (sone of which of course will be productive).
Benanav writes as a declared socialist (in our sense) arguing at the end for a society of common ownership and free access. He used to be a member of the group Endnotes (https://www.akpress.org/endnotes.html
Very interesting. I’d heard of this but never looked it up. More here
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertatia
Where it says that the priest Caraccioli argued that
“every Man was born free, and had as much Right to what would support him, as to the Air he respired.”
This was in fact the original doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church (before it had to find reasons to justify private property of resources). James Connolly in his polemic against a Catholic priest, Labour, Nationality and Religion, quotes from various early Christian divines to show this. For instance, these two:
“Nature furnishes its wealth to all men in common. God beneficently has created all things that their enjoyment be common to all living beings, and that the earth become the common possession of all. It is Nature itself that has given birth to the right of the community, whilst it is only unjust usurpation that has created the right of private property.” – St. Ambrose.
“The earth of which they are born is common to all, and therefore the fruit that the earth brings forth belongs without distinction to all”. – St. Gregory the Great.”Might be worth an article on Libertatia if you’ve the time.
Here’s a more measured approach to Artificial Intelligence than that of those who say that research into it should be paused because it could lead to the creation of a superintelligence capable of making humanity extinct;
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65886125
Of course research into AI should continue even if we know that under capitalism it is likely to be misused (as it already is, as in the drone war in Ukraine). The same machine decision-making technology would be of great help in a socialist world in making decisions about the production and distribution of wealth without buying and selling.
The narrator here seems to be Thomas Sowell. Now (he must be in his 90s) a free-marketeer. In the 1960s he was a bit of a Marxist and wrote quite a good article in Economica in August 1963 on “Marxian Value Reconsidered”:
I don’t think Chomsky did anything wrong. Just asked someone he knew some financial advice. It is a bit surprising, though, that he moved in ruling class circles.
Now they arrested Sturgeon herself. With the Alec Salmon scandal too, workers in Scotland must be relieved that the separatists lost the 2014 referendum. Otherwise they might have found themselves living in a corrupt, banana republic. This should kill off that diversion for, hopefully, a long while.
The problem is not decision-making in London, but capitalism.
” There can never be a ‘mass revolutionary party’ outside of revolutionary times.”
That depends on what you mean by “revolutionary times”.
It’s a bit of an a chicken and egg problem. Are they created by the growth of a mass, revolutionary movement (or party)? — in which case it would be true by definition. Or are they created by some external circumstances such as the collapse of capitalist political rule due to defeat in a war (as in Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1919, your model for revolution) or to some other catastrophe?
We say that it is possible for a majority socialist movement to emerge under capitalism and that thus movement can, and among other things should, use the ballot box to win control of political power to dispossess the capitalist class. You say that this is impossible as, due to their brainwashing of the workers, pro-capitalists will always win elections.
I don’t see why this rules out workers contesting elections in your “revolutionary situation” (Rosa Luxemburg didn’t think so). There would be nothing to lose from doing this. The workers might even win. After all, they are the immense majority. If they lose, then that would show that the times weren’t revolutionary.
Your advice that a socialist minority should “guide” workers to a revolution when most of them are not yet socialist would be very risky and would in all probability lead to a bloodbath. I would have thought that that was the lesson of the German revolution.
To tell the truth, envisaging an armed insurrection and civil war in modern capitalist political conditions is completely unrealistic and counter-productive in convincing workers.
