| Thanks Bank of England.... 14:09 - Mar 31 with 936 views | BanksterDebtSlave |
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/quantitative-easing
"But that’s not why we do QE. We do it to keep inflation low and stable and support the economy." Â
....and of course there's nothing inflationary about this....
"QE also affects the prices of other assets like shares and property.
Here’s an example. Say we buy £1 million of government bonds from a pension fund. In place of those bonds, the pension fund now has £1 million in cash.
Rather than hold on to that cash, it will normally invest it in other financial assets, such as shares, that give it a higher return."
I mean they wouldn't buy things like commodities would they!!
#we'rebeingscrewed
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| Thanks Bank of England.... on 14:27 - Mar 31 with 864 views | vilanovablue |
I don't have an issue with QE per se but the implementation since 2008 has been absolutely awful and is putting the cash in the hands of completely the wrong people! |  | | |
| Thanks Bank of England.... on 14:56 - Mar 31 with 820 views | BanksterDebtSlave |
| Thanks Bank of England.... on 14:27 - Mar 31 by vilanovablue |
I don't have an issue with QE per se but the implementation since 2008 has been absolutely awful and is putting the cash in the hands of completely the wrong people! |
Who would have thunk it.
[Post edited 31 Mar 2022 14:58]
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| Thanks Bank of England.... on 16:21 - Mar 31 with 688 views | chicoazul |
The economy is addicted to it now. Very hard to see a way out of it. With the enormous inflationary pressures both now and in the future I actually think we’re quite lucky to have it in several ways. Does rather give a lie to the neoliberal myth though. |  |
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| Thanks Bank of England.... on 16:47 - Mar 31 with 650 views | vilanovablue |
| Thanks Bank of England.... on 14:56 - Mar 31 by BanksterDebtSlave |
Who would have thunk it.
[Post edited 31 Mar 2022 14:58]
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Not surprised but nothing the Tories do surprises me. I'm surprised it's taken the Americans that long if I'm honest. In response to your second post. | | | |
| Thanks Bank of England.... on 17:15 - Mar 31 with 612 views | rgp1 |
| Thanks Bank of England.... on 16:47 - Mar 31 by vilanovablue |
Not surprised but nothing the Tories do surprises me. I'm surprised it's taken the Americans that long if I'm honest. In response to your second post. |
FWIW I agree however it's worth remembering how much the labour government w@nkered on PFI contracts with the NHS in the early 2000s. It's easy to steer the ship the way want it to when you are on the bridge. What astounds me is why people vote for the same people and wonder why they get the same outcomes! |  | | |
| Thanks Bank of England.... on 18:06 - Mar 31 with 558 views | BanksterDebtSlave |
| Thanks Bank of England.... on 16:47 - Mar 31 by vilanovablue |
Not surprised but nothing the Tories do surprises me. I'm surprised it's taken the Americans that long if I'm honest. In response to your second post. |
The US may have instigated the move by seizing the dollar wealth of nations but I'm not sure the consequences were intended. Dangerous years ahead I reckon as the global power axis shifts!
"MH: Well, figures are only available at the end of each month, reported at the end of each month and then there’s a two-month delay, so we don’t have any idea what’s happening. But I’ve been talking to people all over the world in the last few days and the consensus is that everybody is now deciding the only place, certainly if you’re China or Russia or Kazakhstan or you’re in the Eurasian orbit, South Asia, East Asia, you realize, wait a minute, if all we have to do is something like Allende did in Chile or all we have to do is refuse to sell off our industry to American investors and they can treat us like they’ve treated Venezuela. So you can imagine that everybody’s watching this and there’s an expectation that as a result of the war in Ukraine, that’s really America’s NATO war, that this is going to create a balance-of-payments crisis throughout the whole Global South as their energy prices go up, oil prices soar, food prices are going to soar and this is going to make it impossible for them to pay their foreign debts unless they go without food and energy. Obviously, this is a political crisis. That is, the only result can be to split the world in two.
MF: You’ve been writing about this happening. You’ve written that the de-dollarization has been happening relatively quickly in recent years. So, are we now we’re now just seeing the end result of that? I mean, people said it could happen quickly. Is that exactly what we’re seeing right now?
MH: Yes, and nobody expected that it would happen this quickly. Nobody expected that it would be the United States itself that ends de-dollarization. People thought that, well, most of the sales of my book describing this super imperialism were bought by the Defense Department and they looked at it as a how -to-do-it book. And I was brought down to the White House and the Defense Department to explain to them how imperialism works.
I had expected that maybe China, Russia, and other countries would say, “We don’t want to give America free rides.” And yet it was the United States itself that broke all of this, by grabbing Russia’s reserves right after it grabbed Afghanistan’s and Venezuela’s reserves.
Nothing like this has happened in modern history, even in the 19th century wars. In the Crimean War in the mid-19th century, Russia, England and Germany, everybody kept paying the debts to the countries they were fighting against because the idea is that debts were sacrosanct. And now, all of a sudden, not only are debts are not sacrosanct, but countries can just grab foreign savings. I guess the problem began after the Shah of Iran fell and the United States grabbed Iran’s money and refused to let it pay its bond holders and started the whole war against Iran for trying to take control of its own oil resources. So, all of a sudden, the United States grabbing this has ended what everybody thought was an immutable morality.
MF: So that was in 1979 that the Shah fell in Iran and, and over the last number of decades, the United States has been increasingly using economic warfare against countries through what people call sanctions, but they’re actually, illegal unilateral coercive measures, has that been kind of driving and setting the stage for what is happening today?
MH: Yes, the International Monetary Fund has operated, basically, as an arm of the Defense Department. It’s been bailing out dictatorships, bailing out Ukraine, lending money to countries whose client oligarchies America wants to support, and not lending any money to countries that America doesn’t want to support, like Venezuela. So, its job is basically to promote neoliberal policies, and to insist that other countries balance their payments by undergoing a class war against labor.
The conditionality that the IMF insists upon for foreign borrowing is that countries devalue their currency and lower their wage rates and pass anti-labor legislation. Well, when you lower the currency’s exchange rate, what do you really lower? Food prices are set in dollars internationally, raw materials prices are, and prices for machinery and many goods. The only economic variable devalued is domestic labor (and domestic rents). The IMF has been using this kind of junk-economic free-trade policy as a means of keeping the wage rates in the Global South down. You could say it’s a financialization of an ultimately military conflict to promote neoliberal ideology.
MF: And you mentioned the lowering wages and things like that. And this is actually done because it’s favorable to US investors and US business, right? I mean, the World Bank actually has an index, the cost of doing business index, that helps inform large corporations about laws that countries pass that make them more favorable to businesses to come in.
MH: It’s even worse than that. The central aim of the World Bank is to prevent other countries from growing their own food. That is the prime directive. It will only make loans for countries to earn foreign currency and it has insisted ever since about 1950 that countries that borrow from it must shift their agriculture to plantation export crops to grow tropical crops that cannot be grown in the United States for environmental and weather reasons. And the countries must not grow their own food and must not undertake Land Reform or small family-based farming. So, it insisted on foreign-owned agribusiness in large plantation agriculture. And what that means is that countries that have borrowed for agricultural loans have not been loans to produce their own food. It’s been to compete with each other producing tropical export crops while being increasingly dependent on the United States for their food supplies, and for their grain. And that’s part of the corner they painted them into that is going to be creating such a world famine this summer." | |
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