... As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.
Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose. John Maynard Keynes The Economic Consequences of the Peace VI: 235-236 1919
The American government is shelling out three-quarters of a trillion dollars to try to haul the country out of trouble. Masters of Money I, BBC 2012
It all goes back to the extraordinary ideas of this man – the British economist John Maynard Keynes. Quite simply, he changed the world. ibid.
Keynes has never been more relevant or controversial than he is today. ibid.
Keynes was quite clear: there are times when we need to step in to make capitalism work for us. ibid.
There was one domain where science had barely begun – economics. ibid.
As Keynes had predicted, the price of getting economic relations wrong was calamity. ibid.
He had a special interest in probability theory. ibid.
Economies are made up of people not numbers. ibid.
Eventually the bubble will burst. ibid.
Keynes’s realisation that an economy could stay sunk indefinitely was a radical break with conventional thinking. ibid.
He didn’t just want to understand economies, he wanted to make them work better. ibid.
Governments should spend money they haven’t got. ibid.
By the 1940s Keynes was riding high. ibid.
You can’t leave economies to drive themselves. ibid.
Friedrich Hayek was a champion of the market. He inspired many of the people who built the world we live in today. For more than a generation Western leaders came to embrace one central economic idea: the free market. Masters of Money II: Hayek
Of all the big pro-market thinkers, Hayek was by far the most radical. ibid.
Hayek’s advice to governments was to step back and do nothing. ibid.
The market does most good when it’s most free. It’s our desire to control it that most often turns it against us. ibid.
Hayek had been studying the American boom. ibid.
Strong’s intervention really paved the way for the financial system we have today. Thanks to all that credit he created, the Stock Market rose higher and higher. ibid.
Hayek believed Strong’s policy was sowing the seeds of an eventual bust. ibid.
Hayek said it was all down to interest rates being too low in the free years. ibid.
The grand dispute between Keynes and Hayek in the 1930s seems so relevant to us today, it’s become an internet sensation. ibid.
It was one of the most important intellectual battles of the twentieth century. ibid.
The Road to Serfdom was published in Britain in 1944 with little fanfare. ibid.
Britain was moving Hayek’s way. ibid.
That tension between Hayek’s ideal and a controlling instinct of even free market politicians never really went away. ibid.
The financial institutions that triggered the recent crash were free to do anything it seems except fail. ibid.
Central banks are the cause of many of capitalism’s problems, not the solution. ibid.
We were never going to master the complexities of human nature. ibid.
Hayek helped change the course of world history. ibid.
Dover: the most dangerous man in Europe is about to arrive on Britain’s shores. His preachings are so incendiary he’s been forced out of his native country. Only liberal Britain will tolerate his presence on her soil. He heads to London to live in exile. The year is 1849. But today that man’s writings are still dangerous. They’re so radical, so revolutionary, they continue to divide the world. Masters of Money III: Marx
Is Karl Marx turning out to be right? ibid.
For Marx, the best argument against capitalism is that it was inherently unfair ... Karl Marx had the most radical advice of all: get rid of it. ibid.
It’s what he said about capitalism that rings so true today. ibid.
For Marx, it all begins with private property. ibid.
They always need to make more profit. But in seeking out profit, they end up eroding the basis on which it’s made. ibid.
He saw capitalism as endlessly adaptable. ibid.
Credit provided an answer to all of capitalism’s woes. But only for a while. Remember, Marx thought the system was fundamentally flawed. ibid.
Capitalism’s only ever as strong as its latest temporary fix. ibid.
But the idea that low wages may have contributed to the crisis is gaining ground. ibid.
Marx would insist the trap is inescapable. ibid.
Nobody else has been able to describe a convincing alternative to capitalism either. ibid.
Could there ever be an alternative to capitalism? ibid.
Marx died in 1883 ... Did Marx change the world? Of course he did. ibid.
It was my worst nightmare coming true. Brooksley Born
We will have continuing danger from these markets, and that we will have repeats of the financial crisis ... until we learn from experience. Brooksley Born
We’re trying to protect the money of the American people. Brooksley Born
Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management. George Monbiot
Society today is composed of a series of institutions … There seems to be no system that’s taken for granted and misunderstood as the monetary system. Zeitgeist addendum, 2008
The United States government decides it needs some money so it calls up the Federal Reserve and requests say ten billion dollars. The Fed replies saying sure, we’ll buy ten billion in government bonds from you … In reality, this transaction would occur electronically … In other words, the money was created out of debt. ibid.
And through this fractional reserve system any one deposit can create nine times its original value … The application of interest … must eventually be returned to a bank with interest as well. ibid.
A system of modern slavery … How can society ever be debt free? It can’t. That’s the point. ibid.
At the heart of this institutional self-preservation lies the monetary system. For it is money that provides that means for power and survival. Therefore, just as a poor person might be forced to steal in order to survive, it is a natural inclination to do whatever is needed to continue an institution’s profitability; this makes it inherently difficult for profit-based institutions to change, for it puts in jeopardy not only the survival of large groups of people, but also the coveted materialistic lifestyles associated with affluence and power, therefore the paralysing necessity to preserve an institution regardless of its social relevance is largely rooted in the need for money or profit. It is important to point out that regardless of the social system, whether fascist, socialist, capitalist or communist, the underlying mechanism is still money, labour and competition ... Monetarism is the true mechanism that guides the interests of all the countries on the planet ... People tend to just accept that as The Way It Is. Not seeing the inherent corrupt inhumanity of such an action. Because the fact is, whether it is dumping toxic waste, having a monopoly enterprise, or downsizing the workforce, the motive is the same – Profit. They are all different degrees of the same self-preserving mechanism which always puts the well-being of people second to monetary gain; therefore corruption is not some by-product of monetarism, it is the very foundation. ibid.