ALB
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alanjjohnstone wrote:Graeber in the Guardian seiing on the reporthttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/18/truth-money-iou-bank-of-england-austerity
Graeber overstates his case that bank loans are essentially IOUs. They can be seen as this from one point of view but this doesn't mean that banks can issue IOUs at will without being able to cover them. A bank which did this would soon go under, as the Bank of England article explicitly explains.He distorts what the article says when he writes:
Quote:What this means is that the real limit on the amount of money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow.Most of the article is devoted to describing in detail the various limits to banks' lending (including having to find new outside deposits or loans from other banks and others to remain profitable) which are well below what people want to borrow.
Quote:Just consider what might happen if mortgage holders realised the money the bank lent them is not, really, the life savings of some thrifty pensioner, but something the bank just whisked into existence through its possession of a magic wand which we, the public, handed over to it.This is pure currency crank nonsense. What a bank or building society lends to someone to buy a house is covered by assets which really exist, whether from "the life savings of some thrifty pensioners" or from what the financial institution has itself borrowed at a lower rate of interest. Graeber needs to explain what banks do do with savings people deposit with them if they don't re-lend them. The Bank of England article says:
Quote:banks do not act simply as intermediaries, lending out deposits savers place with themGraeber seems to have deleted the word "simply".
I think you may be thinking more of the old League of Empire Loyalists. UKIP is in fact isolationist, opposing UK intervention in Iraq, Afghanistran and Syria as "foreign wars":.
ALB wrote:It seems to be another example of Zizek's saying that the end of civilisation is seen as more conceivable than the end of capitalism.Just reading a book in which this ("that it is easier to think of the end of the world than the end of capitalism") is attributed to Frederick (I think that should be Frederic, shouldn't it?) Jameson. Does anyone know if Zizek too got it from him?
From Monday's Times:
Quote:The set text of Mr Miliband's leadership on this issue is Varieties of Capitalism, a book of essays edited by political economists Peter Hall and David Soskice. It identifies two models under which to run a capitalist economy: "liberal" (such as Britain and the US) and "co-ordinated" (such as Germany and Sweden). Can Miliband switch Britain from the former to the latter category?Probably not, but even if he could it would still be a "variety of capitalism" with all the problems capitalism causes, as workers in Germany and Sweden will know all too well.
LATEST NEWS: Left Unity to contest one seat in local elections this May:
Quote:During general discussions about the 2014 Council elections, a number of points were made, including: • Left unity is standing in Birmingham Ladywood • As this is the first time out for Left Unity, election campaigns will need careful c0-ordination to avoid low votes • There have already been discussions at local level between TUSC and LU to avoid clashes and co-ordinate campaigns In answer to a question raised by Toby Abse, Bianca Todd said she hoped Left Unity would be a registered party with the Electoral commission in time for the Council elections.They are still afraid of contesting elections because they know that they will get a low vote (not much more than us).From the rest of the same report, it is clear that they are shambles going nowhere. Admittedly they are trying to organise on a non-Leninist basis whichis something to their credit.
Now free electricity:http://www.uswitch.com/gas-electricity/news/2014/03/17/british-gas-to-offer-free-energy-on-saturdays/Note that British Gas doesn't think people will grab more than they need :
Quote:“Ninety nine per cent of customers would use this responsibly for the right reasons. There may be 2 to 3% of people out there who do have a very strange use or extreme behaviour. I will go for the greater good.”Positive Money are trumpeting a claim that a couple of articles in the latest issue of the Bank of England's Quarterly Bulletin back up their theory, in particular the second, which argues:
Quote:banks do not act simply as intermediaries, lending out deposits that savers place with themThey seem to have ignored the word "simply" as well as this passage in the article which explains that banks must have or get the funds to back up their lending, even if these don't all come from deposits that savers place with them:
Quote:Figure 1 showed how, for the aggregate banking sector, loans are initially created with matching deposits. But that does not mean that any given individual bank can freely lend and create money without limit. That is because banks have to be able to lend profitably in a competitive market, and ensure that they adequately manage the risks associated with making loans. Banks receive interest payments on their assets, such as loans, but they also generally have to pay interest on their liabilities, such as savings accounts. A bank’s business model relies on receiving a higher interest rate on the loans (or other assets) than the rate it pays out on its deposits (or other liabilities). (…) The commercial bank uses the difference, or spread, between the expected return on their assets and liabilities to cover its operating costs and to make profits In order to make extra loans, an individual bank will typically have to lower its loan rates relative to its competitors to induce households and companies to borrow more. And once it has made the loan it may well ‘lose’ the deposits it has created to those competing banks. Both of these factors affect the profitability of making a loan for an individual bank and influence how much borrowing takes place. (…) Banks therefore try to attract or retain additional liabilities to accompany their new loans. In practice other banks would also be making new loans and creating new deposits, so one way they can do this is to try and attract some of those newly created deposits. In a competitive banking sector, that may involve increasing the rate they offer to households on their savings accounts. By attracting new deposits, the bank can increase its lending without running down its reserves, as shown in the third row of Figure 2Alternatively, a bank can borrow from other banks or attract other forms of liabilities, at least temporarily. But whether through deposits or other liabilities, the bank would need to make sure it was attracting and retaining some kind of funds in order to keep expanding lending.(emphasis added)This is a good enough description of how modern banks work, though it is not clear that "attract" is the right word to describe how the "other liabilities" are acquired since these will be what the bank itself borrows, "liabilities" being what the bank owes others (as opposed to what others owe them, or "assets"). So, from this angle, banks are "intermediaries" between those who lend them money and those they lend money to, even if it is not as "simple" as that.
Maybe, but there's more (from the blogger not the PhD):
Quote:The argument proceeds to the exposition of grid and group, both as a 'polythetic' system of classification and as one based on a matrix rather than a hierarchy. This provides us with a potentially dynamic classificatory approach. (…) Utopianism is discussed in the framework of the relationship posited by grid and group, between spatial and temporal aspects of the cosmology and the social structure.What is "polythetic" and what's cosmology got to do with?
Quote:Their roots lie in an 'essentialist' tradition of static hierarchical classifications of dynamic phenomena.The rest of it reads like a spoof too.
Ozymandias wrote:Actually, he wasn't at his worst in this particular interview. That's when he's addressing scientists and technologists and uses technobabble to try to flatter and impress them. He's much better in this kind of short 10-minute interview, though this wasn't his best. The viewer will still have got the idea that he was advocating a non-monetary system in which there will be production directly to satisfy needs. And I see he has moved on to attacking "capitalism" by name without apologising (though he still apologises here for using "exploitation" for fear of being taken for a Marxist).
Nine of the 17 NE Branch members on the books voted to adopt the Form C and so to reconstitute the branch as the North East Regional Branch. Unfortunately, most of these are not on the branch online forum. Finding a way round this should not be impossible, even if postal ballots are not ideal.
I see what you mean:http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2730577&postcount=75Should be interesting to compare the two nationalisms with us in the middle opposing both.
slothjabber wrote:the Internationalist Communists-Klasbatalo group from Montreal.Does that mean they're into Esperanto? If so, they might be interested in our stuff in that language: http://www.worldsocialism.org/othlang.php#eo
The difference between a democratic reformist (Social Democrat) and a group of vanguardis reformists (Leninists), I suppose.While I'm writing, what's with this RIP stuff? It's Catholic theology as the Protestants preach that when you die you stay dead till Judgement Day when your body is resurrected, i.e there is no soul to rest in peace. As Benn was a Protestant Christian this might even be what he expected to happen to him. Both theologies are bollocks of course. When you die you're dead and that's it. All that survives is other people's memories of you.
