Complications

The economic crisis continues to exercise minds as much in the Green Party as every where else. Economics, we seem to be told, is seems is a vast, intangible array of concepts that ordinary people can't get to grips with and best left to the experts. Hmm... hasn't that led us to where we are now? I think many of the concepts are actually rather easy to understand but banksters (and I used to be one...) have invented a whole host of financial instruments with complicated names so that they can create more money.

This short film is fairly useful in its analysis of money, however I think there is a major flaw in one part of its thinking, I think it completely misunderstands what interest is and does. I will come back to that in later blogs and in a wiki I've started to create.

In the meantime, the next wave of problems just crashing down on us is Credit Default Swaps. The fallout from Lehman Brothers means that debts of $360 billion are likely to appear on other banks books very shortly, washing away their money. A bit like a tsunami, or even lots of them.