Crazy Money (video)

[peterv]

This is a really interesting video (13 minutes)
Crazy Money

Malcolm Henry shows all the money flows in our economy with simple graphics and real numbers. He explains why the productive economy is always short of money, and why the government can never pay off the national debt.

He goes further than Positive Money in that he calls for a "negative interest rate" on idle money, and he finishes with an advert for his book "Our Money" which I reviewed here  Our Money Review

Watch it and pass it on!

[steveb]

That was an interesting and clear explanation. The argument for negative interest rates is a good one, and is worth considering alongside the recent Positive Money article 'Why we don't campaign against interest'.
Personally, I am increasingly thinking that there is an ultimate problem with interest and am more and more convinced by the arguments for some sort of demurrage to keep interest rates around zero. For a society to thrive, wealth needs to be in the form of community assets, not money.

However, that is an ultimate solution to the pressing problems of money, and one that is only imaginable in a world that would be unrecognisable to our eyes today. We live in a deeply materialistic culture, and people's relationship to money would have to change radically for that to work. As I read it, the Positive Money proposals (although seen as radical by some) are a pragmatic compromise- a workable solution that could theoretically fit into our current system- all be it with a very different role for banking.

The question then becomes, does one adopt an expedient position or or follow what is seen as ultimately desirable? It seems incontestable that we are in for huge changes in the near future, and it is important that different ideas of money systems get a wide audience I would say.