Much has been written about my opinions on money over the last few days, mainly by supporters of Positive Money. What many seem not to have noticed is that I have proposed a way for the government to create large quantities of interest free money to be spent into the economy. This is, if course, exactly, what green infrastructure quantitative easing does.
I have also gone out of my way to explain how this would work in ways that I believe legal and plausible and instead of leaving the money creation process as an isolated act have sought to explain how it can and must be linked to social purpose, because that is essential if this power to create money is to be used by a government.
I would also make clear that I have long argued (well, at least since 2008) that the infrastructure of public service banking should be in public ownership so that if any organisation licensed to operate as a bank were to be at risk of failure their operation could be taken into public control to reserve the integrity of the system as a whole as if they were operating a franchise.
In addition I have argued for the strict separation of public service banking and speculative activity whilst also making clear credit controls are a tool that any government should consider to be available to it, just as capital controls could and should be available to support a government's right to manage its economy.
I would suggest this might warrant serious study by some who want to look at money creation as if it is an issue capable of being assessed in isolation, which it can never be.
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I totally agree with your stance. But as you know, the received wisdom out there that passes for knowledge is strangling us and making us go round in circles.
The ‘cognitive map’ of money creation (see Gillian Tett in the Four Horsemen) is fully owned and operated by the neo-libs. How to get out of its iron grip of this false narrative is the real issue before us.
As you’ve alluded, it will take courageous politicians to do it.
In my own opinion, all banking should be nationalised. If that is too much for the right who will argue no doubt that this is against free and fair competition (forgetting that much private banking is now unrestricted by free competition) then it should simply have national banks run alongside private banks as they did rather successfully for years in Australia in the 20th century.
The time is long overdue for the state to take on a far bigger role in the economy to counteract the ravages of neoliberalism.