There is a lot of point-missing going on this morning. Is there something in the air? This article talks about the fact that cheap money has driven up house prices, but the author fails to understand that if interest rates were raised, housing would still be just as unaffordable. Prices would drop but monthly repayments would stay the same as it is these that fix the price levels. The primary value...

The topic of money reform lies outside our self-defined terms of reference. Our view is that the monetary and banking system are the way they are largely due to the fact that the rent of land is privately appropriated. “As long as the land monopoly is maintained, the few can take possession of what Nature free of charge has granted to everyone, and usury will penetrate the whole society,...

Lending for buy-to-let surges on, with the value of loans up by 31% compared to last year. Large numbers of people have now been priced out of buying and rents are rising. Information from The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) showed £5.1bn was advanced to landlords in the three months to the end of June, an increase of 21% on the first quarter. The trend will presumably continue, since the Governor...

Charlotte-Ann Schreiber interviews Sir Mervyn King…Following the latest Bank of England’s Quarterly Inflation Report we sent our resident economist Charlotte-Anne Schreiber to interview the Governor, Sir Mervyn King, to find out if she could get a simple explanation to some aspects of his statement. “Sir Mervyn, I gather you’ve seen it. This must be a wonderful moment for...

Will Hutton writes in the Observer about banking scandals as lying at the rotten heart of capitalism. That was two years ago but other commentators keep on saying much the same thing. We disagree. The rotten heart of capitalism is the private appropriation of the rent of land, something which Hutton and most other commentators never talk about. Without it, the banking scandals could not happen. The...

An introductory slide show by Jacob Shwartz-Lucas explaining land’s role in the business cycle. Also available in Swedish by Jonas Lagander

The views expressed on this web site are almost never voiced by mainstream economists, politicians and journalists, even those who purport to be radical. Were they to do so they would be quickly silenced. One result is that there is no effective challenge to the Neoliberal project, now in full flood in Britain and the US. This lack of effectiveness manifests both as a failure to argue against neoliberalism...

Banking scandals are all in the news at the moment, and the solution being touted is more regulation. It can only scratch the surface of the problem. There are deeper issues here, as we have said many times before. One is the proper and improper use of credit. We would assert that it should not be used for land purchase or for the purchase of the land component of real estate. Credit should be linked...

Calls for regulation of the banks are back on the agenda. It will not work. Regulation does not deal with the underlying problem: is the abuse of credit through its use for land purchase. The land is usually inside some kind of package which makes it difficult to understand that it is actually land: assets, homes, equities or other securities. The fundamental purpose of credit is to finance the...

In today’s Observer, in an article under the title “Mervyn King didn’t grasp the crisis then – and he does’nt now”, Will Hutton refers to Mervyn King’s admission and asserts that “Sir Mervyn cannot bring himself to declare that the Bank was party to the gigantic intellectual mistake that led to the crisis.” However, Will Hutton, too is a party...