Comments on: Ten years after the crash, civil society has come a long way. But much more remains to be done

By: Alasdair Macdonald

Alasdair Macdonald — Sat, 18 Aug 2018 11:35:00 +0000

And what do ‘property based loans produce?’ Profit for the rent seekers, but nothing for the common good.

By: BC

BC — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 21:03:00 +0000

I remember. An excellent essay.

By: BC

BC — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 20:59:00 +0000

You appear to define “productive” as profit generating. Of course SMEs will fail more often. It’s called risk. A property loan by contrast is simply a bet on the appreciation of property prices due to easily predictable factors – making money as you sleep as John Stuart Mill put it. Michael Hudson describes it more accurately as extracting from the economy wealth that other people have put in: parasitism.

By: Howard Green

Howard Green — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 20:26:00 +0000

I am afraid this seems Panglossian to me. Late capitalism looks more broken every day, and a coherent response is further away than ever. Economic growth as a solution to all ills is impossible, destructive of the ecosystem conditions for human survival, and increasingly irrelevant to real human needs. The most likely outcome for me is that nature takes its course, and the four horsemen reduce human impact on the planet.

By: flyingfish

flyingfish — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 11:42:00 +0000

How little has changed since I wrote an article for openDemocracy on the fifth anniversary of the financial crisis: https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/keith-fisher/frankensteins-bankers-tale-every-taxpayer-should-know

By: Sanjay Mittal

Sanjay Mittal — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 10:54:00 +0000

Re the idea that SMEs are “productive” whereas property loans are not, the fact is that SMEs fail to repay loans twice of often as property based loans, which indicates that SMEs, or at least the marginal SME is not all that productive.