Laurent and others,
I don't feel that we have gotten to the bottom of the question of the role
of Central Banks.
There was an article in the NYTimes on Sunday describing Ron Paul and
mentioning that he wants to dump the Federal Reserve and return to the gold
standard. The basis of the justification seems to be along the lines I
mentioned -- that Central Bank control the economy through the continual
expansion of debt, made necessary by the Central Bank earning interest on
money they create and control.
It seems to me that we on the left ought to have a cogent rebuttal to Ron
Paul (unless we think he is correct). In many ways, Paul is VERY
conservative (e.g., on women's control of their bodies), but some of his
statements about Iraq/Iran are great.
Paul
--On 11/13/2007 12:00 AM -0800 Automatic digest processor wrote:
Household debt: went from 6.4 trillions in 1999 to 13.3 trillions
in Q2 2007 (all nominal - I assume), 75% of it is mortgage debt and
the remaining 25% consumer debt (Z1 report page 8).
BEA published current dollar GDP for 2007 is 13.8 trillions (Q2 yearly /
seasonally adjusted, table 3 of Q3 release) which makes household debt
96% of GDP in the USA.
The average yearly household debt increase over the last eight years was
0.86 trillions per year or about 6.2% of 2007 GDP or about 8.8% of 2007
personal consuption expenditure. Truly enormous numbers.
I wonder why no one adjust growth by debt variations (debt is just
betting on future GDP after all), any taker?
Laurent
************************************************************************
(Vol.23) THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF 9-11-2001 "a benchmark in 9/11 research"
video summary from Snowshoe Films at http://snowshoefilms.com
(Vol.24) TRANSITIONS IN LATIN AMERICA AND IN POLAND AND SYRIA
********************* http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka
