Author Archives: Callum Gurr

Talk about economics, or we’ll be back to the party of the 8%

By Callum Gurr | Mon 3rd April 2017 - 12:36 pm

I was delighted by Tim Farron’s performance at Spring Conference this year; his eloquence and passionate words show a good leader moulding into a great one. Yet, there is one thing that Tim’s speech missed: a distinct view upon the economy. The need for a Liberal Democrat policy on the economy is clear, with Tim himself saying in the speech ‘Britain needs a progressive party… a plan for an economy that makes the most of the opportunities in front of us’.

To put it short the Liberal Democrats need a clear economic policy so that when we get back into government (whether that’s in 2020 or 40 years away) that our voters know what they voted for. To my mind, we must focus upon investment. That investment starts with taking money creation away from high street banks and making it a government-influenced mechanism, as I called for in a previous article. Only then can we invest in our economy without extending the web of debt Britons and Britain find themselves in.

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged economy and tim farron | 54 Comments

Making banking a genuinely free market

By Callum Gurr | Mon 27th February 2017 - 10:45 am

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You wish to buy a house, but can’t afford one – a predicament many face. You approach the bank for a loan, repayable over 25 years. You’d think that the money the bank has loaned is actually other customer’s savings that is held in some ‘physical’ form, yet you’d be wrong. In reality, when the bank made this loan they created the money by inputting numbers into a spreadsheet; bank-created money accounts for over 97% of money in circulation today.

Effectively this means 97% of our money is also debt. When times are good people pay down their debts and the amount of money in circulation shrinks, along with the economy. Government desires to rid household debt is almost impossible; to do so would shrink our economy and wipe out almost all of the money in circulation.

Moreover, history has shown banks are not fair distributors of money; they create too much money (through reckless lending) in a push for profits and most of the money they create is speculated on financial markets and asset bubbles, fuelling the housing crisis. Regulations have proven to not be worth the paper they are written upon, because banks know that no matter how recklessly they lend, they must be bailed out because many people would lose their savings and no government could allow this. Thus the banking sector is a neither free, nor fair, market; its lending is largely monopolised and it is people outside the financial sector that pay the price for its reckless decisions.