Public Banking for Wales, Ireland and Scotland: Promise and Possibilities

[marmar]

Public Banking for Wales, Ireland and Scotland: Promise and Possibilities
Posted on September 11, 2013 by Ellen Brown


Dr. Ian Jenkins of Arian Cymru (Money Wales) has written two excellent articles on why Wales should have its own bank and how that might be accomplished.

Dr. Jenkins is hosting an event in Cardiff on September 26th titled “Banking and Economic Regeneration Wales,” at which Marc Armstrong, executive director of the Public Banking Institute, will be speaking, along with Ann Pettifor of the New Economics Foundation and several Welsh leaders. As Dr. Jensen states:

This is in an issue on which Wales could provide leadership on an EU-wide level, a matter in which a small nation could make a big difference.

....(snip)....

Public Banking for Wales: Escaping the Extractive Model

The economic history of the past 30 years has been, by and large, that of an uncontrolled expansion of the financial sector at the direct expense of the so called ‘real’ economy’ of manufacturing and production. This expansion has been brought about by the hegemony of the free-market doctrines, based principally on fundamentally ideological beliefs in deregulation and privatisation, which have become known as ‘neo-Liberal’ or ‘neo-Classical’ economics.

As former US bank regulator William K. Black put it, ‘In the world we live in, finance has become the dog instead of the tail (…) They have become a parasite’. The private banks have established themselves in this position through the control of the primary mechanism by which money is created within our system: the issuing of credit. In this paper I will aim to briefly outline how this credit function could be redirected from speculation and bubble creation, which constitute the dominant directions of credit issuance under private banking, towards more stable and sustainable areas which would serve the public interest instead of those of shareholders and bank CEOs. This is not a theoretical method, but rather one which throughout the post-WW II period saw the German Landesbanken facilitate the growth of the mittelstand sector of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs), as well as in the present day constituting the means by which the state-owned Bank of North Dakota (BND) contributes significantly to North Dakota being the only US State to run a budget surplus throughout the post-2008 crisis.

In order for a productive economy to exist there must be adequate streams of affordable credit and it is the absence of such constructive investment which, I would submit, has been a vital contributing factor to the decline of the Welsh economy, and indeed that of the UK, in the past 30 years. Before continuing with this analysis it is worth briefly examining the current banking system and the effect of its operations on the real economy, in Wales as elsewhere. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/public-banking-for-wales-ireland-and-scotland-promise-and-possibilities/#more-6111

[Egalitarian Thug]

1. "They have become a parasite". Exactly.

Reining in these banksters is the very first thing that has to happen if we ever hope to change the economic future of this nation.
& R

[truebluegreen]

2. Those dang socialists in Nort' Dakota....