Activity

When the Fed offered to buy a large number of securities held by banks, both mortgage-backed securities and government bonds, bankers exchanged these bonds – some of which were likely to be non-performing and therefore loss-making – for the equivalent of a bigger ‘overdraft’. This ought to have cle…

Equally, its scarcity means that, unlike the endless and myriad social and economic relationships created by credit, the capacity of bitcoin to generate economic activity is limited (to 21 million coins). The currency’s architects deliberately limited the amount of bitcoins in order ostensibly to p…

And if, during a boom, the demand for loans expands beyond the capacity of the economy – in other words, clients apply for and bankers create too much credit, which is then used to chase too few goods, services and speculative assets – the money supply expands. In this case, excessive borrowing a…

The progressive ‘euthanasia of the rentier’ was for Keynes the price society paid for securing full employment, decent public goods and services, and economic stability. Given that the rentier was hardly likely to engineer his or her own demise, then the assertion of public authority over the finan…

[...] The outcome of low yields on government bonds is the massive inflation of property prices [...]