Anyone seriously concerned about the failures of the banking system should not lose sleep over the government’s warning to defer the introduction of new regulations until after the next election. It would not have done much good. The underlying problem with the banking system is its standard model of lending: the use of land titles as security for loans, for, amongst other things, land purchase....

I would suggest that responsible lending would be based on three rules. Interest is not charged. The implication is that it is not paid, either. Credit must not be given except for the purchase of man-made objects eg a ship, a building, artefacts and tools, and to enable production to continue eg to finance a producer in the time until the product has been sold. Credit should not be given for...

What exactly are the proper functions of a bank?

Our sleuths have discovered that the hacking scandal has extended to eavesdropping on private conversations between doctors and patients. We have been passed the transcript of one conversation from a surgery somewhere in the Whitehall area.

One of our members, Robin Smith, has been looking at the nature of mortgage interest. He says this. “Economic rent” is the location value, that is, not including the capital value of the building or the price of its “hire”. Tax is used to pay for benefits received from these community created location values. Roads , hospitals, security of possession, schools etc. So tax...

On Wednesday the Bank of England publishes its quarterly inflation report and the Governor, Mervyn King, will tomorrow write his customary official letter to the Chancellor explaining the reasons why the target of 2% has not been met for the 10th time since April 2007. Our man on the inside managed to hack into the Governor’s computer and has emailed a copy of a private letter sent to Downing...

House builder Barratt has teamed up with Hitachi Capital to offer £50,000 loans to parents wanting to buy Barratt homes for their children. Barratt’s tie-up with the UK financial services arm of the Japanese conglomerate will see the creation of a £1bn fund that will offer 12-year unsecured loans for parents to use as part of the deposit for their child’s new home.

Writing in today’s Observer, Will Hutton talks about the need to reform the banks. It is strange how he and so many of his colleagues succeed in missing the point so precisely. Hutton is just talking about effects. Banks create credit for property purchase, of which most of that value is land purchase. The loan is secured on the land. The lenders then charge interest on the money they have...

The first bout of quantitative easing having achieved nothing useful, there is now discussion about restarting this policy. One effect seems obvious – the £ has dropped from about SEK 14 in 2006 to SEK 11.7 in June to SEK 10.7 today, a record low. Wisdom has it that this is good for exports but there is no sign of any more British goods in the shops in Sweden. There are a few newspaper articles...

Following publication of the official exchange of monthly letters between the Governor of The Bank of England and The Chancellor of the Exchequer regarding the monthly inflation target we have been passed copies of the private correspondence between the two men. Dodgy Dossier cannot guarantee the validity of the letters but they seem sufficiently genuine for us to reprint them here.