Raising interest rates to stop the private sector from spending ÂŁ will result in a recession.
The national debt will increase - profiting the bond markets with interest payments.
Then government austerity measures cut in because they’ll claim there isn’t enough “tax payers money” to fund public services.
The banksters then swoop to invest in care homes, the NHS and even council services like waste collections… paid for by increased council taxes.
So it goes like this
Energy Prices £⬆️
Energy Company Profits £⬆️
Household Finances £⬇️
Bond Market Investors £⬆️
(from BoE interest and deals to run public services)
Council Taxes £⬆️
Government Spending ⬇️
U.K. Economy ⬇️
In other words, this is saying that £2.3 Trillion of the government’s so called £3 Trillion debt has ended up as long term private sector savings and converted into government bonds. That conversation from simply being “savings” into a bond is what is incorrectly referred to as “borrowing”… it’s not borrowing it’s an investment by private investors!
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In 1980, Heseltine described Thatcher's 'right-to-buy' scheme as "the biggest transfer of capital wealth from the state to ordinary people".
Correction - given that the average UK house buyer pays 1.8 times the capital on a 25-year mortgage, it was also the biggest transfer of monetary wealth from the public sector to private moneylenders. It also blew up an asset-inflation bubble for good measure, making house prices 5-7 times rather than 2-4 times the average salary. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c699…
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Late stage capitalism:
A supermarket throws perfectly good food in the dumpster, pays its workers so little they can barely afford groceries, then asks customers to donate to the food bank at checkout.
And we're supposed to admire how fucking efficient this system is.
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Since privatisation in 1991, the water industry has built 0 major reservoirs and made English rivers the dirtiest in Europe.
This is not due to a lack of oversight. It is because privately owned companies lack incentives to deliver the investment needed to fix our water system.
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In an unending cost-of-living crisis, driven not by excess demand but by catastrophic underinvestment in energy security, despite Britain being the Saudi Arabia of wind and tidal, the Bank of England has decided to make us all poorer to suppress demand that doesn’t exist.
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The New Deal built a new infrastructure based on fossil fuels because oil prices collapsed and the private sector ended up in a slump instead of creating the system of the future.
Today, renewable energy prices are collapsing and we need a New Deal to build the infrastructures of the future, because the private sector is not doing it, pushing us into end-times profiteering instead.
I gave Claude (left) and ChatGPT (right) exactly the same prompt. Here's the visual each one generated to summarize Galbraith's terrific essay. ineteconomics.org/perspectiv…
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My entire adult life has been defined by the fallout of the financial crash and the nearly 20 years of austerity that followed, and you're telling me THOSE were the salad days???
"Painful" years ahead, think tanks warn, as living standards set to fall
bbc.in/4k5Vgsz
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It has made me want to cry that the celeb traitor winners have donated to refugee charities, on the BBC, to thousands of viewers. Both @chooselove and @refugeecouncil do fantastic work and I’m proud to be colleagues with them. The far-right are outnumbered. Hold on to it.
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Britain is already run like a business, which is why we bungle from quarter to quarter fretting about the balance sheet, instead of doing the serious State-building work of looking to the next five years, next decade, or next century.
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We (not them) must suffer pain, say two neoliberal think tanks founded by conservative politicians, hedge-funders and tax (avoidance) advisers. They don't say why - they're cutting back their leveraged moneylending because we can't guarantee them enough interest (free money). If we breathe a word about public investment their bond trader and media scaremongering pals will try to tank the economy and unseat the government. On and on it goes.....
"Painful" years ahead, think tanks warn, as living standards set to fall
bbc.in/4k5Vgsz
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Living standards don't have to fall. We could do things differently (and better).
"Painful" years ahead, think tanks warn, as living standards set to fall
bbc.in/4k5Vgsz
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Periodic reminder: the Bank of England rescued the markets and not vice versa during the Truss debacle. New calls for public austerity are class war on behalf of the rich; we actually need class war economics in the other direction. Democratize finance, democratize the economy!
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The purpose of Neoliberalism is to divert public money to the private sector.
That's why we pay ÂŁ14 billion annually to private landlords, instead of ÂŁ14 billion to local authorities to maintain, upgrade, and expand their council housing stock.
Also, Govt surpluses are bad.
Claiming the UK is living under austerity is factually wrong.
State spending accounts for around 45% of GDP - its highest for decades and the UK’s tax burden is the highest since WW2.
We haven’t run an annual surplus this century, and have instead been spending more and more each year (even under the Tories) paid for via borrowing.
People use “austerity” as a by-word for “I’m struggling financially”, but the reason people feel squeezed is because our economy is inefficient and unproductive (in large part because of high tax and regulation) - meaning growth remains sluggish and therefore living standards aren’t rising in real terms.
The likes of the Greens trot out statistics like “one in three children live in poverty” when what they’re really referring to is relative poverty, not absolute poverty.
The latter is a genuine scourge, the former is a left-wing construct that justifies ever increasing levels of state spending which, when that doesn’t produce the desired results, then leads to calls for yet more borrowing, spending and debt.
It is an economic doom loop - and NEVER an excuse for violence like in France.
Ben retweeted
People like you, commenting from your ivory tower, have no idea about the level of resilience amongst working people. 50 years of Thatcherite neoliberalism, being bled dry by private equity parasites, takes far more grit than you'll ever understand.
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We are in the final stage of capitalism where global capital can’t expand or sustain past profits. It now consumes public institutions and key systems, sacrificing democracy, welfare, infrastructure, education, healthcare, and ecosystems for short-term gain.
Ben retweeted
CIA document from 1952 outlines how they embarked on programme to promote right-wing Christian currents to clamp down on what was later called "liberation theology" in Latin America.
"The present rather weak and uncoordinated efforts of religious groups to combat Communism should be vigorously reinforced," the CIA noted. "Tremendous advantages to the Western program would ensue if it were possible to persuade all religious groups to unite in a campaign attacking Communism because of the Godlessness inherent in the Marxist doctrine."
It continued: "It is therefore vital, if covert activities are to be effective, that they are carefully concentrated where they can accomplish the most". At the time the CIA complained that "its assets as to personnel and covert mechanisms are not capable of covertly supporting many different and wide-spread activities" in Latin America.
This soon changed - and support for ultra conservative Christian currents in Latin America continues to this day.
One big victim of this operation has been Brazil, where conservative Evangelical and Pentecostal churches have been promoted relentlessly. They were, later, a key element of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro's base - and now his son.
The CIA (and MI6) did exact same in West Asia using, in this case, ultra conservative Wahhabis and Salafis as a bulwark against secular nationalism, socialism and anti-imperialism. Nasser in Egypt was the biggest target of all after he nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956 and the resulting UK/France/Israel invasion failed.
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Will Labour next week in the budget tell us sad stories about "difficult decisions" and how there's "no money left?"
Or will this Labour Government challenge the broken economic thinking that has lead us to this place? And tax the assets of multimillionaires & billionaires?
đź‘€
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More evidence that Burnham’s efficiency-through-profit vision of government is going well. Of course this could be directly funded and provided by the state - but if someone isn’t making £££s then it doesn’t happen. @UKLabour working for capital.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm62…
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“They are not just dead. They are people who were killed. They are not numbers. They are lives, each with a name, a face and a family.”
This is how Pep Guardiola @PepTeam begins his deeply moving message about Palestinians in Gaza, in collaboration with UNRWA