Britain alone gave the banks more money than it cost to put a man on the moon six times over. Where did our money go? Who let the banks get away with it? Why? Can vampire squids ever be useful? No government yet is brave enough to tame them, perhaps they need a plan. The spending cuts agenda is an attempt by the government to shift debt from its account to that of the public.
It's not going to be driven by panics, manias, speculative bubbles. None of this is going to happen. If there is movement up and down it's because something real is happening, and traders and investors in financial markets are responding to it.
We want to help preference them over big trans-national corporations, because if they've got hold of their money and they can use it with each other, We want to help preference them over big trans-national corporations, because if they've got hold of their money and they can use it with each other, then it doesn't disappear up out of large management structures and go offshore and end up in an account in the Cayman Islands.
I think that has to start happening in the UK, because we're in a demand-side recession, rather than looking at crisis of supply. You have to have a system where credit is put into productive avenues, where credit is put into building high-speed rail links, into building houses rather than giving people money to inflate the price of houses.
And then there are institutions, the outstanding one at this point is the IMF, that will actively try and enforce this state of affairs. So it's not greatly shadowy, that there are people behind the scenes somewhere trying to manipulate stuff. This is actually quite overt. This is happening and this is how it has been for my entire adult life.
After independence, these instruments were applied for financing expansion. Why was such a small country able to hold its own against so much bigger countries, for example Spain and Portugal, that had the benefits of their empires for over a century in respect of the Netherlands?
Growth and inflation If you want a growing economy, under the current set-up, we have to have growing debt. This is something very, very few people really understand, especially not the politicians who are managing the economy, which is a scary thought.