Comments on: An alternative to QE: was Billy Bragg right after all?

By: Mr R W Ebley

Mr R W Ebley — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 15:38:00 +0000

In order that change is effectively undertaken all levels of government and other public funded organisations need to demonstrate good management

Independent management accreditation is required to achieve this

Thank you

By: Alasdair Macdonald

Alasdair Macdonald — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 21:44:00 +0000

Bodger Broon, the useful idiot who was once Prime Minister, and Chancellor Alistair Darling, who was, of course, simply serving the needs of his class (descendant of a Tory MP, alumnus of Loretto School, member of the bar, legal misuser, by switching homes, of MP’s expenses) used QE to transfer public money to the wealthy and powerful. It was described by several commentators in 2008 as ‘socialism for the rich’.

By: Stephen Ferguson

Stephen Ferguson — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 21:08:00 +0000

Alfie, Oops I see via twitter that you have seen it.

By: Stephen Ferguson

Stephen Ferguson — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 21:03:00 +0000

Richard Murphy has an excellent critique of the IPPR paper here…

http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2018/04/23/ipprs-new-macroeconomic-report/

“IPPR is right to tackle macro. And they have got People’s QE right. But
social and economic justice requires that we break the hegemony that has
created the injustice we are suffering. This report does not do that.
As such it fails in its goal. I hope it might be revised.”

By: Ralph Musgrave

Ralph Musgrave — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 17:17:00 +0000

Re the National Investment Bank which changes the amount of investment spending according to whether the economy is in recession or not, investment spending is difficult to switch on and off at the press of a button. It is easier to adjust CURRENT spending. Also big adjustments to spending are not easy for those at the coal face, thus “adjustment money” needs to be spread a widely as possible, so as to minimise the AMOUNT of adjustment in specific sectors.

Re the point that governments (i.e. politicians) are clueless when it comes to getting the deficit right (i.e. suffering from deficit bias or surplus bias, as pointed out in the above article) the solution is to remove the decision as to how large the deficit should be from politicians, as suggested by Positive Money and others at the link below, while politicians retain the right to take clearly POLITICAL decisions, like what % of GDP goes to public spending and how that is split between education, defence, etc.

http://b.3cdn.net/nefoundation/3a4f0c195967cb202b_p2m6beqpy.pdf

That Positive Money work, incidentally, also avoids the above bias towards investment spending in a recession: that is politicians are free to spend stimulus money any way they want. If they opt for very big gyrations in investment spending, with resulting ineffeciences, they’d likely be voted out of office.

By: Jed Bland

Jed Bland — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 11:21:00 +0000

Billy Bragg’s ideas may well be dangerous to those for whom his ideas do not fatten their bank accounts.