pvonhellermannn , to random
@pvonhellermannn@mastodon.green avatar

This article by Gary Stevenson is so good, please read every word of it.

“Whatever Jeremy Hunt says, traders know the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. And they’re paid millions to bet on it.”

This is what the world is - it is run by a minute elite for a minute elite and the rest of us, the masses, the natural world, we just don’t count. It is a (will reshare my own piece on this below 1/n)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/05/banker-budget-mega-rich-traders-jeremy-hunt?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

pvonhellermannn OP ,
@pvonhellermannn@mastodon.green avatar

🧵 6/n This is important: in contrast to most other Central Banks, which simply sit out losses, the Bank of England has an indemnity arrangement requiring the Treasury to cover its losses. This has resulted in £38-£40 billion going in effect from taxpayers to private banks in 2023, and same this year. Adding a second hashtag:

FT article only for subscribers, I know (i get it through work). Here screenshots of key passages.

https://on.ft.com/4bUtp80

There should be public outrage: the APF's winners are private banks, whose pre-tax profits in the first nine months of 2023 reached £41bn, roughly the amount received from the APF and nearly double on the previous year, at a time when Britain endures the longest hit to living standards since records began. In turn, Bailey has refused to change the APF mechanics, holding up the totem of central bank independence that terrifies politicians. But this is not a matter of independence. The Treasury pays the Bank by choice and institutional design, with no solid theoretical justification. The Bank could simply follow the established practice at other large central banks who bear the costs of paying interest on reserves. That the Bank chooses otherwise points to the bigger stakes here: Britain is going through an extreme version of what the political theorist Wendy Brown called "undoing the demos", where unelected technocrats in control over monetary-fiscal dynamics are chstructing future governments

But fiscal space is a political construct, as Liz Truss painfully learnt. Who you tax, how and what you spend, and how you defend yourself against the bond vigilantes policing your moves are all political choices, informed by ideological visions and constrained by institutional set-ups. The Bank of England's role is rarely visible, by design. The Bank is supposed to stay out of fiscal affairs. Yet its invisible hand is now depleting the Treasury coffers to boost commercial bank profits. This is the consequence of the institutional arrangement for quantitative easing, through the Asset Purchase Facility (APF) run by the Bank of England. Unique in the world, the APF has cost the UK Treasury around £38bn in 2023 and a projected £40bn in 2024. The Bank of England has projected that under the "optimistic scenario, the Treasury will pay the APF around 110bn throughout a 2025-2030 government, and net costs could reach £230bn by 2033, beyond Labour's wildest green spending dreams.
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    • pvonhellermannn OP ,
    @pvonhellermannn@mastodon.green avatar

    🧵 7/n Now something different - this really is a rag bag, really just adding things as they come along, occur to me, no careful crafting! Just things that enable you to trace and understand how money flows to the rich, how accumulation works. So here, a piece, with this fantastic map, of second homes in the UK, in in particular. Key arena of widening

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/06/were-on-a-cliff-edge-cornish-village-where-52-of-houses-are-not-first-homes?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

    Map from this article, showing second home home ownership across the UK, with particularly high concentrations in coastal areas like Wales and Cornwall Guardian graphic. Source: Census 2021, ONS. Note: count is by MSOA, a sub-unit of a local authority designated by a number, eg Cornwall 007. MSOAs with a numerical holiday home count below 10 are excluded (grey on the map). Local authority boundaries shown in white
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    pvonhellermannn OP ,
    @pvonhellermannn@mastodon.green avatar

    🧵 8/n Adding here a (somewhat sweary, apologies) Politics Joe interview with Gary Stevenson (see 1/n), talking about the rapid increase in inequality in the UK and the world, and also about how we need to make people SEE THIS. They need to realise that the reason their lives are shit, that they can't get houses, is growing inequality. Because the system is set up to make money flow to the rich. Everyone needs to understand this.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVvoyRpxG-A

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