Move Your Money UK - Bank On Something Better Ngaire Woods: 'IMF have learnt lessons of austerity' The International Monetary Fund's top economist, Olivier Blanchard, has acknowledged that the fund blew its forecasts for Greece and other European economies because it did not fully understand how government austerity efforts would undermine economic growth. In October 2012 the IMF admitted austerity measures were causing economic damage which was as much as three times the amount originally forecast. And in this latest paper, they are standing by their initial conclusions, but say the harshest impact of those programmes may be fading as economies start to recover. Professor Ngaire Woods, former independent advisor to IMF European Regional Advisory Group, told Today business presenter Simon Jack that the IMF have "learnt the lessons of austerity over the last 20 years in other countries." She added that the IMF are stressing "any country that can, should slow down austerity, [and] shouldn't do it as one big bang upfront, because the results on the economy will produce a vicious cycle...
Carbon Tracker Initiative Legal Forgery Introduction FairPensions Why bankers are intellectually naked A definitive explanation of the industry’s economics warns the causes of the financial crisis have not gone away and will return The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do About It, by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig, Princeton, RRP£19.95, RRP$29.95 The UK’s Independent Commission on Banking, of which I was a member, made a modest proposal: the proportion of the balance sheet of UK retail banks that has to be funded by equity, instead of debt, should be raised to 4 per cent. This would be just a percentage point above the figure suggested by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. Why might even so tiny an increase in the equity-funded proportion of the balance sheet be objectionable? If you think that running banks with so little loss-absorbing equity is crazy, you are right. It makes no sense to build either bridges or banks sure to collapse in the first big storm. Attentive readers will learn that financial fragility is a feature of the system, not a bug.
The Finance Innovation Lab | Incubating and accelerating new forms of prosperity. For people and planet. A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse | David Graeber David Graeber [from The Baffler No. 22, 2013] What is a revolution? At moments like this, it generally pays to go back to the history one already knows and ask: Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be? Already by the time of the French Revolution, Wallerstein notes, there was a single world market, and increasingly a single world political system as well, dominated by the huge colonial empires. A quarter of the American population is now engaged in “guard labor”—defending property, supervising work, or otherwise keeping their fellow Americans in line. Revolutions are thus planetary phenomena. Until 1968, most world revolutions really just introduced practical refinements: an expanded franchise, universal primary education, the welfare state. It’s fashionable nowadays to view the social movements of the late sixties as an embarrassing failure. The ironies are endless. Future Stop I’ll take an obvious example. It would explain a lot. How did they pull it off?
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