Comments by "Curious Crow" (@CuriousCrow-mp4cx) on "Richard J Murphy"
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You as a pilot are not the norm. The vast majority of people have no idea of Crew Resource Management. yes, I watch Mentour Pilot's videos as well, so I know that certain personalities increase the risk of accidents and deaths in the workplace. Most professionals in risk critical professions would know that, because their professions have learned from the tragic lessons of the airline industry. But most of your passengers don't have a scooby doo. Culturally, socially, and psychologically, they have no idea of the active effort needed to keep them safe. That's why certain passengers are rude, get drunk, are aggressive, complain about having to wear seat belts, and still attempt to smoke in the toilets, all while in a thin metal tube in the sky... They don't realise what could go wrong until it does, because they don't see the effort, or look under the hood until things go wrong. Government is another thin metal tube in a different context. Effective government should work to keep things working so that everyone else can live effective and productive lives. And we don't pay attention to that until it doesn't. Now, that also applies to people who think they know better, or are impatient with checks and balances, or just want what they want, and to hell with the consequences. And when you let the lunatics take over the asylum, you get chaos. You get destruction. Reality is a harsh mistress. Bury your head in the sand for whatever reason and she'll kick what's above ground until you pay attention to her. And the temptation is always there, and becomes acute when things don't work as they should. And nobody is immune to this, because it's the way our brains evolved. Taking shortcuts, limiting input, and biases all save limited processing power. The best of us learn to think and pay attention, and not rely solely on our fears and anxieties to solve problems, but to think their way through important issues. But it's hard to pay attention to the issues of 300 million people, so we delegate that tho state and federal government, and if they're distracted by perverse incentives, flattery, or folly, the Swiss Cheese Model explains what happens because of poor communication, neglect, or folly. When things start to go wrong, there's always going to be some bright spark to game the system, or to abuse it, especially where there's money to be made. And deals are done, and life goes on. Until it doesn't. Everything now in the Trump administration is designed to distract or deflect from the real task of Trump and his acolytes, which is to raid the cookie jar. And Trump is only the gateway drug to that. We are living in a dark experiment where our millionaires and billionaires have taken over the plane and are pushing the envelope of how much they can squeeze our of it. And they're wearing parachutes, but everyone else is not so lucky. And, there will be others after Trump, who will try harder to break the system for their own gain. Until we pull our heads out of the sand, and take democracy seriously again. It's like a garden. You might employ contractors to look after it, but you have to get professionals in and refuse to hire cowboys. Stop voting for people you wouldn't lend money to, or let them give your pretty daughter a lift home. Stop settling for less. Demand the best, or get the worst.
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@TheGalifrey Respectfully, you are incorrect. The EU is our biggest trading partner. Spending it on shared projects means technology and resource sharing, which makes up for the loss of capacity and expertise caused by nearly 2 decades of Austerity. If we go it alone, it takes longer, costs more, and keeps us away from technological R & D we could get access to, which is counter-productive, as well as earnings. It would stop the rot of austerity turning to an incurable cancer, limiting growth in our economy forever, because it would allow is to rebuild capacity in production and R & D quickly. We haven't got the time to be precious about it. Everyday we mess about, the fundamental factors that can improve the welfare of our our people are being eroded by the folly of Brexit, and our inability to curb human greed. We don't have time to be precious.
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@Brian_Equator That's only in theory. In practice, cartelisation and monopolisation are more common than you suppose. Just a little test from the School of Economics by Walking About. Just check how many companies dominate consumer goods manufacturing. Washing powder for instance? Airlines? All the big industries have major players that are 5 or less in number who control the majority of the market. So much for competition. Then there is crony capitalism, where a certain sector dominated by a discrete group. In theory, competition is supposed to drive efficiency. But in practice, competition tends to be avoided, because direct competition means death. Corporations don't like dying, just like the people that make up these organisations. Instead, they seek market power in order to build moats around their businesses and prevent competition. It's why we have trade wars at the moment. It's the desperation of big fat cats corporations with schlerotic and uninnovative enterprises trying to protect their gravy train, by shutting out competition. And even when they have a big moat, like Boeing, the squeeze every last penny out for the shareholders mentality, throws the gravy train off the rails. I mean, going bust to build yet another Airforce 1? You couldn't make it up. This is why neoliberal economics was and is a busted flush. It's a cultural and economic failure, as can be seen by the desperate drive to deregulate everything as though you can't make money by providing what people need or want. Or, your business can't survive unless it's labour costs are subsidised by the tax payer. Or, it's easier to make money ripping of your customers, or engaging in stock market pump and dump schemes. And instead of holding up their hands and admitting their parasitic behaviour is breaking the social contract and destroying economies from the inside, they want to double down with the assistance of technology. No; in reality corporations do not want competition, they do not welcome it, and they spend time and money crushing it, and getting government to help them. And we suffer the consequences.
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You're not taking into account the problem of tarrifs being an imprecise tool.
Firstly, 60% tarrifs on China, will not hurt them, because they will just cut prices and increase exports elsewhere, whilst issuing retaliatory tarrifs against the US. And that will undercut US export prices elsewhere in the World.
Secondly, global supply chains are heterogeneous - people buy components from where it's cheapest everywhere, and then manufacture finished products, and export those. These may be multipart components, and how is anyone going to tell how much of a component is Chinese? So, global supply chains are directly and indirectly dependent on Chinese manufacturing, from beginning to end. Direct imports from China thst are 100% Chinese are easy to identify, but those that aren't are not. And a blanket 10% tarrifs for non-Chinese imports will not escape retaliation either, hurting US exports. for anyone country not to retaliate would be political suicide for their governments. So there will be a backlash which will cost US exporters dear.
Thirdly, by causing inflation, the cost of substituting those goods that are tarriffed will hurt US consumers who don't even buy Chinese goods, as the cost of their borrowing will increase alongside their spending because the Fed will impose blunt force trauma by hiking interest rates. That's a doom loop in the making.
If tarrifs are used selectively, US manufacturers may still offshore to anywhere but China. The US cannot compete on Labour costs, and tarrifs will create greater cost differentials, forcing more offshoring.
Nobody negotiates with a gun to their head. Tarrifs create Trade Wars and black markets. This isn't the 19th century when the US was a developing economy. It's the 21st century, and the US is a developed economy. And Tarrifs right now, are going to hurt the US more than it's going to heal it. It's an expensive face saving exercise.
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No. You don't understand. Money is two things. 1. A measure of value, and 2. A commodity. The government can never run out of money, because it is literally as someone else before says like a carpenter running out of inches or centimetres. What changes is not the unit of measuring value, but the perception of the value being measured. Why? Ask yourself why since 1971, bus fares that were £0.02p then, have now inflated to £2.00 for the same journey? What has shrunk is not the measure - 2p is still 2p, but the prevailing belief of the value of what is being measured. This goes back to how money is now mostly credit - from the Latin "credo" meaning "belief" rather than just "currency" i.e. a medium of exchange. You can see that nearly 95% of all money in circulation is now bank credit, with the remainder being physical cash, or central bank reserve credits. So, one cannot run out money. Rather, we can run out of belief it is worth anything.
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Oh boy, could the Bank of England make life better. By reconsidering the cost to the economy of paying interest on Bank Reserves, which is more than £40bn a year that is being paid to banks to do something that they have to do by law already. Together with cuts to corporation tax pushes up the money being transferred to the banks by the state closer to £50bn a year, which is about 33% more than was being spent on Education (£37bn).
It's simply unsustainable. We have children living poverty going up year on year, but the State is financing bankers' bonuses, perhaps in an industry that is socially and perhaps economically dysfunctional. Why can't the banks stand in their own feet, and operate without subsidy? They used before 2006, and we never heard of bankers children suffering from diseases of deprivation then or now.
This policy began in 2006, and now nearly 20 years on, there is no sign of this stopping, but it's Unaffordable. Is this a protection racket? Or What?
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If the rational part of the human brain is a duvet cover protecting a larger mass of emotions, memories, and survival instincts, the mere existence of the cover is not enough to keep the duvet underneath from getting twisted up. Thus Alexis de Tocqueville argued that people feel more than they think. If the brain was a set of siblings, the prefrontal cortex is the baby of the family, and easily overridden by the older siblings in evolutionary terms. That's how it goes. So we need a cultural change in how we manage that.
We need to go slower, not faster. We have to accept that facts are not always objective, and that things that can't be measured matter too. We have to educate people for life and not just work, and teach them not only how their brain works, but it's shortcomings too; how to reason, and how to manage their emotions.
We've been so busy striving to get rich, that we did not know we were impoverishing ourselves at the same time. If people were taught the power of an experimental mindset, we would be less prone to being deceived by our biases, and we would be better off and happier too. Of course, this is a ideal wishlist. Nobody in power is going to adopt that. But there is nothing stopping the bottom up doing for themselves, because peace of mind in the midst of uncertainty, is true wealth. But at the same time accountability must be at the centre of our collective systems. We are, after all, stewards for thise that will come after us. We can satisfy our needs and wants in the present, but not at the expense of the future. So, we must see and think of ourselves differently. Because if we don't, they're are those like Musk, Thiel, and Trump etc., that want to do the thinking for us. And the fruit of that tree is bitter.
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Absolutely. The human brain evolved in stages, and the survival and the relationship building sectors are the oldest parts of the brain. The irony is that the prefrontal cortex, which we tend to lionise so much, is the youngest evolution, and the weakest, it because it's arguably not essential as the older part for our evolutionary task, which is to survive long enough to produce and raise young. The prefrontal cortex increases the odds, but it's not essential per se. In this respect, if you imagine that the older parts of the brain are a duvet, and the prefrontal cortex is a duvet cover, you can see what the relationship is between them. The duvet is essential. And the duvet cover enables it to perform better at its job, but is of itself, no substitute for the Duvet. But it keeps it cleaner, and stops the duvet from getting twisted up or lumpy, which reduces its effectiveness.
Elon doesn't know what empathy means or really does. And know the very little I've heard from his parents and about his upbringing, I suspect I know why he doesn't know what that is. He was born at a time where autism wasn't as understood as it is now. And his parents did the best they knew how, but he needed more than they could give them. And we see the results in his behaviours. And the joke is, if the world did not feel compassion for him, he wouldn't be where he is now. He doesn't want to acknowledge that. And that's sad.
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Sir, I have lived to see the price of a one-way bus ride into my city centre go up from 2p to £2.50, and for my sins I have lived through the time you speak of. And until the 1970s things were better than they are now. You could go to the shop with a green £1 note and come back with bread, milk and marg from the local shop and still have change. Now, you would be pushed to buy a decent newspaper with that. Yes, there were bad times, but as I found out when I studied British Economic History and then went on to look at British Political Economy and studied finance, I realised that I could not see at the time what really was going on. It would be quite easy for the uninformed me to see things as you did. But the data does not lie. Looking at the economic data, Neoliberalism's greatest achievement was to entrench the largest transfer of wealth to the already asset wealthy from the working class. They totally moved from a mixed economy where there were a greater variety of jobs for all abilities, to an economy dominated by financial services and the service industry which makes up around 85% of GDP. Great when times are good, but utterly useless when the whole global economy is based on absurd ideas, leading atrocious policies, and even more corruption. Hence the atrocities being committed on the sick, the poor, and the unlucky. And then the working man, and the family are going in the samr direction. Neoliberalism is a busted flush, because the financialisation of everything empoverishes everyone except the asset wealthy. Now our young people are being cheated out of a decent future. Because of that folly, the economy is being hollowed out. And AI will be the next coffin nail in the workers of this country. We're going backwards with diseases of poverty resurgent, our children are less well fed, and life expectancy has stalled. I walked up 13 floors in the dark during the power cuts due to the 3 day week, but I was more secure then, than I am now. That's why people are rioting. They are fearful, angry, and resentful because they are more insecure than their parents. And until Neoliberalism's cult leaders finally wake up to the fact that their ideas were unsustainable, things will not improve. So, would I go back then? Yeah. I'm not richer now. But I would have had a better quality of life then than now.
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Are they? How do you know that? You do not know how old some of these government bonds are, and you obviously don't understand percentages. We still have bonds from the Napoleonic War period still being serviced today. The coupon rate on these are like 2% or 3% on a £100 bond. So the annual cost is still £2 or £3 per year. In the early 19th century that would have been a huge sum. Now, in the 21st century, you can't even buy a sandwich for that amount of money. Check for yourself. There are inflation calculators online for the UK, based on the Bank of England's database. Mine which calculates from 1800-2023, tells me that £2 in 1800 would have the purchasing power of £218.70 today, but the UK government still pay 2% on a £100 bond from the 1800s, as the coupon is a percentage of the original bond. They are not inflation protected. This is simple liability management. So Starmer isaking a political choice, and not an economic or financial one. Governments are the only institutions who can borrow on this basis, but Starmer has misreperesented the reasons why he is against privatisation. Starmer hasn't taken the King's Shilling: he's taken his donors' shilling. Corporations and plutocrats court whosoever is in place to be in government, and Starmer isn't politically canny enough to play the game to his advantage. He's using the state to keep his donors happy, and not the electorate. But tbh, he's no different to anyone else in doing so. Read "The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (2022 expanded edition)" by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. It should put you straight about political imperative.
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MMT is a description of "what is."
The Job Guarantee is something that some people think that Government "ought" to do. Therefore, they are two different things. Just because some of those who accept the description MMT offers, then go on to argue that Government "should" use its money creation function to give jobs to everyone who wants one, is nothing more than a policy recommendation based on the beliefs of the people who are promoting it. It's remains nothing more than a belief that other might find attractive or be threatened by.
Although it is often very hard to do, we need to be careful not to conflate "oughts" with "what is." That sort of approach leads off the certain road of facts, into the less certain road of beliefs, and ultimately ideologically driven debates. We see this now with the tendency for the footballification of ideas. Ideas are supposedly binary, when as we know that that they tend to run along a spectrum. So the Job Guarantee debate is about whether one is a necessity, and if it is, how one should be funded. This bleeds into the debates about what the role governments "should" have in the economy. And of course, the current illusory binary is "small" vs "big" government, and that debate goes away whenever there is a crisis, doesn't it?
Follow the solid path of established facts, and then on policy, inform your opinion by analysing the arguments.
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Because they can't use their currency to buy US Dollars, and they have no liquid assets to sell for US Dollars.
One thing people don't realise is that having access to US Dollars is essential as it is the currency that all commodities are denominated in. So you have to pay in US dollars. If you don't, you have to pay more to cover the cost of exchanging your currency for USD. In this sense, the US dollar is "International Money" as it is accepted everywhere at its nominal value. This has been the case since the end of World War II. In the decade after World War II, the US had capital controls, where US Dollars leaving the country was strictly limited. Europe including the UK found it difficult as the only USD in Europe was the balances left from the Marshall Aid programme, and these weren't enough for a continent rebuilding after the war. This meant difficulties in buying food, energy, and goods. And the US arguably used their control of the supply of USD to drive forward it's foreign policy. The UK and France would run into that problem when they conspired with Israel to invade Suez, which the Egyptians had nationalised. The US used the shortage to apply pressure on UK Prime Minister Anthony Eden and France to quit Suez, or face a Sterling crisis. He had to agree, and it cost him his job.
Accordingly, in Europe including London, a trade built up between the private banks holding deposits of USD and countries and multinational companies needing USD to buy commodities. It was so profitable, that it became the basis of global money creation being outsourced to Banks rather than governments. But that's another story for another time. Hope this helps.
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The Temptation of "The Plumb Pudding" is still the same, whether it is served at the end of the 18th century, or the start of the 21st century. It is most tempting as fast food, for regimes too lazy, inept, or arrogant to create economies that work for everyone in them, for both rich and poor, thus driving their economies into stagnation, or mere despots' envy. And they try everything bit doing the right thing. In either case, until some semblance of sanity reasserts itself, we are where we are.
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