It starts at 2:40 but the best bit comes from 4:20.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Live streaming news from the top channels.

You can't be me, I'm taken

http://www.citiesinmotion.com/

it's an interesting game

'tis strange I should be old and neither wise nor valiant.

The coffee bar - precursor of Swinging London.

You can't be me, I'm taken

the italian language has no word for accountability, the closest is 'contabilita' which has no personal dimension, just accountancy really.

the other one...'notorieta' is fame, (for whatever reason), not notoriety, with its perjorative meaning.

fascinating what lexical and conceptual semantic equivocations live deep in the cracks between languages.

~Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems.~ Naomi Klein.

Pour fêter dignement le 150e anniversaire de la "reconnaisance par l'Eglise des apparitionsde Lourdes", l'évêque de Tarbes a annoncé la semaine derniere d'importants travaux sur le site, qui accueille 6 millions de pêlerins par an. "A Lourdes, les piscines changent de place", écrit le journal, qui note que ces bassins sont fréquentés chaque année par 400 000 personnes. Un vrai bouillon de culture. Il fallait que ça cesse, d'autant que, comme l'a rappelé l'évêque, "jamais la Vierge n'a demandé de se baigner".

Ni d'ajouter du chlore dans l'eau bénite?

I. Background
According to information from the Troika, Greece has most likely missed key programme objectives again in 2011. In particular, the budget deficit has not decreased compared to the previous year. Therefore Greece will have to significantly improve programme compliance in the future to honour its commitments to lenders. Otherwise the Eurozone will not be able to approve guarantees for GRC II.
II. Proposal for the improvement of compliance
To improve compliance in the 2nd programme, the new MoU will have to contain two innovative institutional elements on which Greece will have to commit itself. They will become further prior actions for the second programme. Only if and when they are implemented, the new programme can commence:

1. Absolute priority to debt service ...
   
2. Transfer of national budgetary sovereignty ...
   

Our question really is not whether the LTROs were a liquidity game-changer but what comes next, especially if banks are mostly using the cash to pay off their own creditors but not for extending to the real economy. (Nor for extending to their governments, much: compared to ECB's €489bn LTRO in December, Italian banks bought €4bn of sovereign debt during the month, JPMorgan's Flows & Liquidity analysts noted on Friday.)

Buried in the ECB's release on December's monetary developments, for example, Societe Generale analysts noted the biggest-ever monthly decline in loans to the non-financial sector:

...

Which is exactly why we thought way back in December that the ECB changing its rules on accepting "credit claims" (typically, bank loans) was a huge move. But it's going to be amazing if the ECB can manage this kind of deleveraging prospect and avoid some kind of additional QE, like its peers in the US and UK in 2009.

Though paper isn't ideal to build a sturdy structure to inhabit, it proves to be an excellent medium to produce exquisite representations of urban and exotic architecture. Amsterdam-based paper artist Ingrid Siliakus brings us these magnificent cityscapes cut out of paper in her Paper Architecture series. Built similar to pop-up books, many of the paper sculptures are capable of folding onto themselves or changing proportions, based on how obtuse or acute the angle of its binding is.

The First 5000 Years of Debt

David Brancaccio: When you think of debt, you probably think of a 30-year mortgage or a five-year car loan. But anthropologist David Graeber looks at debt differently. He examines debt through the Millennia. He's with Goldsmiths -- University of London and his new book, "Debt: The First 5,000 Years," goes into the idea of debt, and if we really, really have to pay back what we owe.

Professor Graeber, thanks for joining us.

David Graeber: Thank you.

Brancaccio: Of course, it's morally wrong not to pay your debts back. I mean, your folks didn't teach you that?

Graeber: Well, one of the things that I discovered, when looking at history, is that people always say that. But in practice, it's not really the case -- especially people on the top of the food chain. They know that everything's negotiable. The strict morality of debt tends to be for the little people.

Brancaccio: But it's so deeply ingrained. Here, you may have heard the following lines. The actor is Al Pacino, the screen writer is William Shakespeare.

Al Pacino: The pound of flesh that I demand of him is dearly bought. T'is mine. T'is mine!

Brancaccio: And I will have it. I mean, the person who wants his money back is traditionally seen as a person who needs to get his money back.

Graeber: And he's also the villain, isn't he. That's the fascinating thing. Throughout human history, people have tried to reconcile too completely unreconcilable ideas: Morality is paying your debts, money lenders are evil.

Brancaccio: So we love credit, we just don't often love the image of the person we owe the money to.

Graeber: Precisely.

Brancaccio: But this notion of that you're a bad person if you don't pay your debts back, you're saying is actually up for discussion?

Graeber: Absolutely. I mean, a debt is a promise. It's a certain type of promise, it's a promise that can be quantified. And therefore it's a promise that can be transferred to other people.

Brancaccio: But, a debt is a contract and it's argued quite persuasively that rule of law and enforceable contracts are what allowed us to achieve the standards of living that we have. Yes, contract law is not a law of physics, it is a human construct. But by accepting contract law, a lot of good flowed from it.

Graeber: Certainly, but there's contract law and there's contract law. Throughout human history, debts have been renegotiated. In fact, most of the most successful civilizations in human history always had some way of readjusting debt so you don't end up in a situation where the big people end up effectively enslaving the little people.

In Mesopotamia, for example, they had debt cancellation. It was almost a systematic thing. Every new king who'd come in would say, "All right, clean slate. Start over a gain." The biblical Jubilee was the same thing; every seven years, debts would be canceled.

Brancaccio: Are there good uses of debt?

Graeber: Absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of small-scale communities in Africa for example, where it's just considered right that everybody should owe each other a little. So, there are some places where debt and sociality are really the same thing.

Brancaccio: The term you're using is "sociality."

Graeber: Yeah, the idea that everybody should have links to each other. And debt was a way of making that real.

Brancaccio: You point out that a lot of very familiar English words actually descend from this idea of debt.

Graeber: Yes, "reckoning," "redemption." Even phrases like "a person of no account or worthy." They all go back to credit. Because when you don't have a state enforcing a debt, well then debts take on a whole different color. One's honor, one's decency and one's credit are basically the same thing. So whereas, for us, if you spend money helping the poor, that's probably going to lower your credit rating, because you're more likely to miss a mortgage payment. For most of human history, if you're a decent person or generous, that would actually improve your credit.

Brancaccio: So there's debt as social capital and is also, if you borrow some money to do something worth, like investing in plant and equipment to make medicines to cure tropical diseases. But there's also this other kind of debt -- quite familiar to many Americans and it sounds a lot like this from the 2009 movie "Confessions of a Shopaholic":

Rebecca Bloomwood: Rebecca Bloomwood. Occupation: Journalist. Jacket: Visa. Dress: AMEX. Belt: MasterCard. It's vintage! And I got 1 percent cashback.

Brancaccio: Gee, without debt she doesn't have any self-image at all.

Graeber: Well, in a way, credit has come to substitute for what used to be community.

Brancaccio: So it's no longer a social glue, a kind of social capital. It's something else.

Graeber: The fact that we want to buy a beer for our friends, the fact that we want to have a party for our children, that we want to take care of each other suddenly brings people in a situation where they're in constant fear and looking over their shoulders, because they're in [HOT] for their lives.

Brancaccio: So what's this you have an idea, maybe, another one of these biblical jubilees might be in order of mass debt forgiveness? What do you think?

Graeber: I think it wouldn't be a bad idea, and I've got a lot of criticism for this and it's a provocative idea. But I think we should at least think about it. Because we're using an antiquated idea of what money is. If money is just a credit system, it's a series of promises. Well, promises by definition can be renegotiated.

Brancaccio: Well, why? To get people out of this cycle of having to serve the debt that they owe and to do something, perhaps, more productive?

Graeber: Yes, I think that would free up a lot of energies of people doing things that they don't really want to be doing and work that doesn't even really need to be done.

Brancaccio: Look, if you could engineer a jubilee, and I wouldn't have to pay off the rest of my mortgage and the credit card debt that I still owe, I'll be first in line for that. Fabulous at first, but the thing is -- right? -- no one would lend again. People lend for a lot of reasons, but they especially lend to make an informed bet on the borrower's future. It's a way of turning my honor as a kind of guy who would pay back into ready cash. And that's just going to dry up credit into the future.

Graeber: Well, that's what people always say. But in fact, in the past, that's not been the case. Because what are people going to do with their money? The money really doesn't exist unless you lend it. Banks make up money by making loans. If they don't make loans, there's no bank.

Brancaccio: The front doors of the United States Federal Reserve are down at 20th and Constitution Avenue in D.C. I'll meet you down there. We can see how far we get. We'll have a chat.

Graeber: Yeah.

Brancaccio: Alright, thank you very much.

Graeber: My pleasure.

Brancaccio: David Graeber is an anthropologist at Goldsmiths - University of London. The book, "Debt: The First 5,000 Years."

Graeber's work underpins the creditary nature of currency.


"Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky