Archive for category: Banking & Economics

The Disastrous Success of Fractional Reserve Banking

The Disastrous Success of Fractional Reserve Banking

If indeed the time has now arrived to seek monetary justice and to harness public indignation at usurious banking practice, then it is also time to seek a better understanding of how it all went so suddenly wrong and what is to be done about it. The current procedure – […]

The Criminality of the Financial Sector

The Criminality of the Financial Sector

Many supporters of the Occupy movement identify the need for more effective regulation of financial institutions as one of their central demands. At the same time, the response of governments to the myriad abuses and ethical failures of the financial sector has been to call for new regulation or legislation, […]

On the Futility of Regulating Finance

On the Futility of Regulating Finance

If anything bridges the gap between many in the Occupy movements, the mainstream press, and many in the financial elite, it is their diagnosis of the causes behind the current crisis. Finance got out of hand; bankers got too greedy; governments didn’t regulate properly. Having a similar diagnosis of the […]

Funny Money Policies: How Our Obsession With Growth And Cheap Labor Undermines Economic Policy

Funny Money Policies: How Our Obsession With Growth And Cheap Labor Undermines Economic Policy

A front-page story in the Washington Post on July 31 of this year might have considered other reasons why growth has not led to more employment, besides simply claiming that growth has been “too slow”. First, the jobs that workers would have gone back to have largely been off-shored as […]

The Loophole Economy

The Loophole Economy

As human beings we have to be optimistic. There is nothing natural or inevitable about the current state of affairs. We all need to steer the social system. People these days are well aware of corporate bribery and corruption. You can hardly turn a newspaper page without reading about phone […]

The Evil of Usury and the Good of Neighbourliness

The Evil of Usury and the Good of Neighbourliness

Welcome sisters, brothers. Today I want to speak to you of good and evil! What is usury? It is a charge made for the use of money. More or less, it means lending of money at interest, and medieval economic systems were dead set against it. Why? Because it threatened […]

How Is The City Built?

As the City of London prepares to usher in its new Lord Mayor this week, the Occupied Times asks: just how does the City elect its leaders anyway? The City’s residents get a single vote each; businesses get anywhere up to 79 votes depending on how many employees on payroll. […]

The Psychology of Debt

The Psychology of Debt

The tuition-fee generation will limp into the world owing tens of thousands of pounds. And they are not alone. More and more of us – through a combination of college loans, credit cards, mortgages and bank loans – are being stealthily habituated to debt. We end up feeling that it’s […]

Faith And Finance

Faith And Finance

The Occupy London movement is directed against the proverbial “one percent” – not against St. Paul’s Cathedral. It is directed against the disproportionate concentration of wealth and power at the expense of the many. Bearing this in mind, here are 7 of the 10 trustees of St Paul’s Cathedral Foundation, […]