Balanced Trade eliminates massive net monetary flows to acquire financial assets ... when the trade account is in balance, then, abstracting from some smaller accounts, income flows, unrequited transfers, acquisitions of financial assets and official transactions all also net out to zero ...
... so without massive trade surpluses there cannot be massive outflows to acquire financial assets.
Fiat currency cannot stabilize an economy ... but stabilizing an economy is not the job of the money supply. The money supply needs to be flexible to accommodate changes in economic activity ... and that economic activity requires real stabilizers, not nominal stabilizers, with the most important of those being a Job Guarantee policy.
Balanced Trade with a domestic Job Guarantee ... entirely off the menu. So the problems are not solvable, so the problems must be redefined to eliminate worrying about impacts on regular citizens and focus concern on how to protect large portfolios. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Stability won't happen unless markets are distributed rather than centralised, mindless casino speculation is outlawed, investment self-organises in a bottom-up way, and the economy becomes project-based rather than job-based.
What's happening now is analogous to the enclosures, only this time it's money - and fiat money at that - which is being enclosed and hoarded, to everyone's detriment.
Money should be a common resource, available to all. The usual rhetoric is that the peasants can't be trusted with it. But the historical record proves that self-styled aristos are appallingly bad at managing cash accounts, natural resources, natural talent, and innovative and creative skills.
So if we're going to have a financial revolution, market exclusivity is going to have to be one of the first things to do, replaced with a much wider and more personal experience of participation and stakeholding, back down to the community level.
Money should be a common resource, available to all.
Would you mind expanding on that? I'm not being critical, just interested ... because of course the entire history of money is about it being scarce and available only at the price of great difficulty and suffering, unless of course you belonged to a select class that controlled certain things.
So how, in practice, does money become a 'common resource'? Do we not also have to contend with erroneous folk ideas about money in that process? One of those ideas being that money should be scarce, because otherwise people will never put their noses to the grindstone and things will not get done ... an idea which, on the face of it, is consonant with everyday experience (how much work would you do if you actually had the money you needed already?)
Again, I do not put this forward as an objection, but you can see that the idea has a lot going against it in terms of people's actual experience of money.
Money is really just story-telling, and the scarcity is artificial. We're not really talking about money so much as access to education and opportunities to express originality and innovation.
Money buys trinkets, but the most important things it buys are the power to define narratives.
It turns out that you don't necessarily need money to change narratives. Having it helps, but canny use of pressure points and alternative or new media can be influential too.
It's also possible to imagine ways in which investment, funding and 'work' are restructured to lock out predatory speculation, so that people keep more of their productivity. This can be done without breaking any of the existing institutions - by locking money into other more participatory alternative institutions, a start can be made on starving the predators into irrelevance.
(I'd say more but I'm hoping to spend the year doing something to put these ideas into practice, and I'd rather not talk about details for now until I see how that works out.)
As far as achievable, that is not an assumption, it is a conclusion of the Job Guarantee plus Balanced Trade analysis. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
And risk aversion is not just a personality trait: in the absence of a social safety net the downside risk can be quite scary. We have met the enemy, and he is us — Pogo
