Financial services are mostly parasitic on the real economy since they produce nothing.

By Tommas GravesIf we had land value taxation, how would the banks deal with the lack of security represented by the value of titles to land used as collateral for loans?

Something for the weekend, from our Dodgy Dossier… A herd of big banks have been rampaging through the country destroying valuable cash crops and eating their way through taxpayer’s bailouts. Big game hunters, lead by the famous Buffalo Bill Cable, have gathered to root out malpractice and skin bonuses to the knuckle.

The April 2010 edition of Practical Politics covers a wide range of apparently disparate topics, all of which are ultimately linked to the ownership of land and what happens to the income stream it yields.

Its the end of term at Westfriars School and the Headmaster wants to clear up a serious financial crisis at Red House, where Gordon Frowne is the House Captain.

“No-one will ever know, but the Bank of England remains impotent when it comes to controlling demand in the economy.” This is the conclusion of FT commentator Chris Giles in a short video discussing the effects of Quantitative Easing, a policy which was ended at the meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee in February 2010, a year after it was introduced. Should we surprised? In the...

This comment on the Guardian’s Comment is Free this morning set me thinking. Financial services are the lifeblood of any economy (and a million miles from being “socially useless” – sorry, that’s just ignorance) and for the UK to specialise in this area is just about the greatest stroke of genius going. Finance is labour intensive and offers high wages for all (even...

Lord Turner, head of Britain’s Financial Services Authority (FSA), this week described much of the City’s activities as “socially useless” and questioned whether it has grown too large. What the City ought to be doing is to arrange finance to enable trade and industry to function smoothly. But what amounts to a casino has grown up on the back of these legitimate functions....

Both in the US and Europe, there is much talk of bank regulation to stop another boom and bust. It will not work. The time will come, perhaps fifteen years from now, when economies will seem to be on a path of steady growth. People will say, yet again, that this time the growth is sustainable. There will be pressure to remove the regulations, which will be seen as unduly restrictive. Politicians...

What is Quantitative Easing and will it lead to inflation? Tommas Graves presented these thoughts to a discussion group last week in an attempt to help understanding of the subject, but no firm conclusion was reached in this highly abstract topic… When Quantitative Easing was proposed it was an unknown idea, and many thought it would create inflation. Now that the dust has settled, what are...