Space Bandit wrote:
Point taken....

So now it's back to blaming the 3rd world militias & warlords who spend it all on arming people (feeding the money back into the MIC)

Mike wrote:
They got a massive (humongous) loan from the US govt and the economic conditions back then allowed it to happen.
They'll get no such help this time, nor will they be able to expand the economy no matter what they throw at it in the way of CB money.

The UK's prime income is banking services and we all know what happened to that sector don't we?

Then you also have the mathematical situation. Simple maths will show that 1% of a trillion is a hell of a bigger number than 1% of a billion, you can ofc try to inflate your way out of it but thats precisely the zimbabwe situation you expect to avoid.
Bear in mind it has to stay at the 1% rate for the next 30 years too...lol.

Where is this miracle business market thats going to produce over and above inflationary returns for the UK for the next 30 or 40 years to pay back that debt comfortably and who's going to be the customer for it?

Maybe China will outsource its factories over to the UK at some point when we have no dole and no nhs whatsoever and we're all on 10p an hour?

andyh wrote: Also, in addition to the above, which is all completely accurate, the UK has to make 2% growth per annum just to cover the interest on its loans.

That doesn't involve paying any back.

It doesn't decrease the budget deficit which increases the overall amount of debt.

That's just to pay back the interest for one year, and necessitate no further borrowing on top of that figure (although the UK has to borrow every month to run its basic services).

That's the current situation, although if GDP fails to grow by 2% per annum, the amount required to service the interest can go up, as it will anyway as the overall debt is increasing at a rate of £1,000,000 every five minutes.

In addition, if at any stage credit ratings agencies decide that Britain can't pay its debts back (which they will when it's beneficial to the banking sector) then the amount of interest that has to be paid will increase. If the credit rating agencies said tomorrow that Britain should be at junk credit rating, then the country is flat broke, literally flat broke. The only thing keeping things going is the ability to borrow at a preferential rate every month.

This is why, to come back to the OP, provisions have already been made for banks to legally steal cash from depositors.

wake_up_bomb wrote:
The US is in an envious position.

They have the worlds reserve currency and the worlds mightiest military force and also if needed some considerable self sufficiency.
The UK is in no such condition. We should perhaps invade the credit ratings agencies and nationalise them LOL

.......... wrote:
Not as such, the point being that debt both on the scale of nations and at an individual level is a means of control - and the scam is international affecting different people in different ways.

"public debt did not cause the problems, private debt is the problem governments have been borrowing to fix..."

That is what the ECB is doing when it agrees bail out or bail in packages for member states, applying medicine to countries who were victim to private speculation, loaning EU member states cash etc, propping up the states offsets the negative potentially catastrophic effects of unregulated financial markets and vulture capitalists.

The solution proposed by Keen in this video is increase wages cause inflation and thus reduce the real terms value of the debt, i won't say I completely understand but it's a rational, coherant, theory based (Minsky/post Keynesian) approach to the debt crisis.

Mike wrote:
As long as its the lower and middle class seeing the money then yes you would get inflation back.
Currently the bailout cash does not appear in the economy because it just disappears to balance digits on bankers screens, hence why we have had no inflation yet despite huge money printing.
We are losing jobs , cutting wages etc.

However... there is more to this than merely money there is also the work and projects that have to be in place to justify the labour.
China for example had people building these ghost towns we have seen, pointless perhaps but this is how you get the money pumped into the real economy instead of the bankers economy .
Ideally the bankers economy of stupid trading should not exist, it's very existence has led us to the situation we see today

Mike wrote: The guy in this video, Steve Keen, completely agrees with the point-of-view that the planet is weighed down under a vast quantity of private debt. There are any number of examples of this, but here's one:

finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/sto...-keen-121950839.html
Note, he is actually saying that there's a hell of a lot more debt than the $51 trillion which governments openly admit to.

His website is called 'Debtwatch' FFS!

www.debtdeflation.com/blogs

He totally disagrees with classical economics, derides it completely, and has written a popular book doing precisely this. Some of his views are discussed here:

www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-10/steve-...s-fiscal-cliff-1930s

There are any number of links available explaining his views, but he does not advocate any government-based spending solution to these issues, because there isn't one.

Besides which, none of this has anything to do with the OP. The OP is about banks having the right to steal money from depositors. This is completely documented and uncontentious. It's just a fact. I've already provided figures to show 100% that Britain can never pay back its debts (this is before you get into the vast private debt that Keen is talking about). That's also a fact. There is no macro-economic solution that will fix it in a satisfactory way (this is where I disagree with Keen who advocates a 'debt jubilee').