STWR - Share The World's Resources

A cross party group of MPs has urged the government to introduce a small tax on foreign exchange dealings as a way of raising money to combat poverty worldwide.

A new United Nations study reveals that migrants working in industrialized countries sent home more than $300 billion to their families in 2006 – surpassing the $104 billion provided by donor nations in foreign aid to developing countries.

Economic growth is a political sedative, snuffing out protest as it drives inequality. It is time we gave it up.

Earlier in the year, economic life seemed so straightforward. Growth around the world was buoyant. Inflationary pressures were building. Excess liquidity – however defined – was a major worry. The vast majority of central banks were planning on raising interest rates.

The mismanagement of money and credit has led to financial explosions over the centuries. The causes, cures and consequences of such financial catastrophes are most often repetitive. Indeed, such financial collapses are usually the result of the unbridled greed and cupidity of financial operators and of the lack of necessary supervision by public institutions designed to protect the public and the common good.

C.H. Douglas (1879-1952), a Scottish-born engineer, who worked for a number of American and British companies in the early years of the twentieth century, was the founder of the modern monetary reform movement. My own interest in monetary reform dates from discovering Douglas’s ideas through a reprint of A.R. Orage’s articles about them in Orage’s publication The New Age dating from the 1920s.