Bush, Obama, NINJA Loans and the Greek Debt Crisis
By Max Musson: It appears that Greece is teetering in the brink of bankruptcy and if we were to listen to the usual financial pundits of the mass media, it would appear that ‘those Greeks’, those ‘lazy, hot-headed’ Mediterranean types — the kind of people who like to spend all day in the sun, eating olives and kebabs and drinking cheap red wine and ouzo — have gotten themselves in one hell of a financial…
ITV Leaders’ Debate & the Elephant in the Room
By Max Musson: As we all know, the forthcoming General Election will be largely irrelevant to the future wellbeing of the British people — we will after all simply be swapping ‘Tweedle-dum’ for ‘Tweedle-dee’ in an election that will almost certainly end in a Conservative led coalition or a Labour led coalition and in a continuation of fundamentally the same policies that have been so damaging to our nation over recent decades. Against this background…
The Origins of the Banking System
By Kasredin: In order to understand how banks work, it helps if we go back in time and explain how banks first came into existence. The topic of inflation is linked to the development of banks. As a teenager I studied the Elizabethan era in history lessons at school, and I remember reading that prices rose sharply during this period of English history. I wondered why this happened, but my history textbook did not explain.…
Financial Crisis: The Printing Presses Set to Roll Again
As the worldwide credit crisis continues, the annual symposium of international central bankers, held annually in late August at Jackson Hole in the Rockies, seems set to signal another round of quantitative easing, i.e. the printing of banknotes that are then used to repay part of the national debt of the individual nations concerned, and thereby stave off financial collapse. Public faith in central banks as guarantors of macro-economic stability has been massively shaken by…