“A highly stimulatory monetary stance was needed to sustain demand”, writes Charles Bean, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, in an article in the FT. The purpose of money is (1) to facilitate the exchange of goods and services and (2) to enable people to retain their claims on wealth over a period of time – to provide “a store of value”. Money can be used as...

Martin Rowson’s cartoon in the Guardian says nearly all there to be said on the latest round of quantitive easing But not quite all. From our perspective, it is proof of the intellectual bankruptcy of the economic policies and theories followed by the Conservative government, the Labour government before it, and the economists and bankers who advise them. What is, however, hard to understand...

In our previous comment on the Irish U-turn on the proposed ban on upwards-only rent revision clauses, we referred to an article in the FT giving the background to the decision. One of the reasons was pressure put on the Irish government by an organisation called NAMA, the National Assets Management Agency. This is a state body set up by the previous Fine Gael government to take over the toxic loans...

The government’s announcement of guarantees for 95% mortgages for house purchase, suppported by both Prime Minister Cameron and Deputy Clegg, demonstrates either an absolute lack of understanding of the nature of the problem, or moral cowardice, or both. The aim, we are told, is to “unstick the housing market”, which has stagnated due to the banks’ refusal to give mortgages...

With protesters still camped outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London, the BBC religious weekly programme Sunday had a piece on morality and the market. The view by the protagonists for markets was that the market is neither moral nor immoral, but amoral. The sort of replies from those interviewed took the line that, “we are just trading”; “we produce a lot of wealth”;...

The mortgage is the device by which banks create money in return for the pledge of land rent privatised by a home buyer. Mortgages are a double injustice leading to poverty, financial instability and unaffordable housing.

It is worrying when powerful and influential politicians declare their support for damaging and unprincipled economic proposals. But it happens all the time. Setting out his pitch in anticipation of the G20 Summit which starts in a few days’ time, Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, announced that he wants the European Union “to take the global lead in introducing a...

Our Dodgy Dossier is of course for amusement only – but when politicians, professional economists and the majority of commentators obviously have little or no idea what they are talking about and make things up as they go along, we make no apologies for this frivolity. If this sounds arrogant – how it is that leaders and economics experts from the greatest countries in Western Europe...

Our undercover reporter has a part-time job as a contract cleaner working at the Treasury, and managed to sneak into George Osborne’s office late last night where, screwed up under the desk, he found a piece of paper headed. TOP SECRET – BRIEFING NOTES TO CoE. We aren’t sure who exactly CoE is as there are quite a few organisations with that acronym and for all we know he could...

There is increasing nervousness in government circles about proposed changes that will split up and ring-fence the retail arm of the banks from the tarnished investment or ‘casino’ operations that contributed to the current crash. However, we have obtained a leaked draft report containing proposals suggesting that far from separating the retail and investment arms, the government is...