By 2010 the foreign exchange market had grown to be the largest and most liquid market in the world, with an average of $4 trillion of currency being exchanged every day. Volatility creates a need. What does it do to countries, especially perhaps small ones like developing countries, if there are suddenly huge and instantly fluctuating financial flows?
The government is showing enormous reluctance to regulate the housing market, and to regulate the amount of money that banks put into houses.
You can't deal with poverty when you have a financial system and a money system that distributes money from the poor to the very rich. Any distribution that you try and do in the opposite direction is effectively pissing in the wind. If you look at issues like increasing inequality, one obvious way to tackle inequality is to have a redistributive tax system.
Policies such as student fee increases and the privatisation of public services, assets and industry follow the same model. The problem we're facing is that there is this transference from the public debt to private debt.
who get us out of it, and incidentally, they're going to run your country now. There's a serious question of democracy that has opened up here. By the way, the banking crisis drove more than a 100 million people back into poverty.
So the only way, in the current system, that we can have any money in the economy, the only way we can have money for business to trade, is if we've borrowed it all from the banks.
And it's the very opposite of what the Tory Party is arguing today, which is that you have to create savings before you can help the National Health Service.
And it's because economists have completely confused those things, both in monetary policy terms, but also in economic thinking, and because most people still harbour the old-fashioned view that you need savings before you can invest, that we have the mess that we're in today.
The practice carries on anyway but you can't argue in the same way that you used to, it's good or It's necessary, or this is OK for the world. In the last decade we had a new innovation: called "a credit default swap". A way of buying insurance against a company you invested in going bust, and in 2002 they were worth less than $1 trillion. In 2007 they were worth $60 trillion. That's five years. Everybody is suddenly sitting there saying, "Oh! These CDOs we've made don't in fact provide the kind of stability that we thought.