The global financial alliance will prioritize profit and speculation | Unpublished
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Larry Kazdan has undergraduate degrees in history and sociology, is a retired Chartered Professional Accountant and runs the website
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The global financial alliance will prioritize profit and speculation

November 16, 2021

     Re:  Protecting the Earth — not the wealth of financial tycoons — at the heart of world’s unprecedented climate commitments, David Olive, Nov. 11, 2021

    

    While our schools, hospitals and roads are usually built by contract with private enterprise, we generally want such infrastructure to be owned and controlled by government to serve public purpose rather than to maximize benefits for private monopolies.

    The same can be said for the new energy and transportation systems required to fight climate change. If left to its own devices, the global financial alliance will prioritize profit and speculation as it always has, regardless of destructive environmental and social consequences .

    The claim that government is "cash-strapped" and must step aside is the revealing narrative lie. When private sector excess leads to great crashes, to whom do capitalist titans go begging for bailouts? They know that ultimate money comes from monetarily sovereign governments that control central banks. 

 



    Footnotes:

    1. Michael Hudson is Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author The Bubble and Beyond (2012)

    http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/05/parasites-in-the-body-economic-th...

        "The objective of the classical economists was to bring prices in line with value to prevent a free ride, to prevent monopolies, to prevent an absentee landlord class so as to free society from the legacy of feudalism .....

        ***

        To prevent such price gouging...., Europeans kept the most important natural monopolies in the public domain: the post office, the BBC and other state broadcasting companies, roads and basic transportation, as well as early national airlines. European governments prevented monopoly rent by providing basic infrastructure services at cost, or even at subsidized prices or freely in the case of roads. The guiding idea is for public infrastructure – which you should think of as a factor of production along with labor and capital – was to lower the cost of living and doing business.

        ***

        If you look at the Forbes 100 or 500 lists of each nation’s richest people, most made their fortunes through insider dealing to obtain land, mineral rights or monopolies."



    2. The financial markets should be kept away from the climate crisis solution

    http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=48650

        "The narrative that has emerged – that the financial CEOs with “trillions in assets” (all at COP26 because they could smell lucre) are a key to solving the climate challenge – is as ridiculous as progressives saying we need to tax them to fund schools and hospitals.

        Both narratives reflect the dominance of mainstream macroeconomics which has convinced us that currency-issuing governments are like big households and can ‘run out of money’.

        It is time we learned."

    3. Alan Greenspan, former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman

      http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1997/19970114.htm

        "...... monetary authorities—the central bank and the finance ministry—can issue unlimited claims denominated in their own currencies .......a government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency. A fiat money system, like the ones we have today, can produce such claims without limit." 

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    Modern Monetary Theory in Canada

    http://mmtincanada.jimdo.com/