[A-List] Infinite Debt

[Tony B.]

....Agreed. I was thinking the same thing myself, i.e. the  article ends 
just where a Marxist analysis would take off....

Tony

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Patrick Bond" <pbond at mail.ngo.za>
To: "The A-List" <a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu>
Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2009 5:43 AM
Subject: Re: [A-List] Infinite Debt


> Comrades, while it's a nice descriptive article, would we agree,
> analytically, with this?
>
> Seems to me this lends itself to populist interpretations when the
> challenge now is to draw much more explicit linkages between real sector
> decline (especially due to overaccumulation in manufacturing from the
> 1970s) and financial bubbling. Bellamy Foster and Magdoff's new book do
> this quite well, without relying on 'usury' as an explanation for the
> funding flows Geoghegan worries about here.
>
> Cheers,
> Patrick
>
>
> Bill Totten wrote:
>> How unlimited interest rates destroyed the economy
>>
>> by Thomas Geoghegan
>>
>> Harper's Magazine Essay (April 2009)
>> ... And then we dismantled the most ancient of human laws, the law 
>> against
>> usury, which had existed in some form in every civilization from the
>> time of the Babylonian Empire to the end of Jimmy Carter's term, and
>> which had been so taken for granted that no one ever even mentioned it
>> to us in law school. That's when we found out what happens when an
>> advanced industrial economy tries to function with no cap at all on
>> interest rates.
>> Here's what happens: the financial sector bloats up. With no law capping
>> interest, the evil is not only that banks prey on the poor (they have
>> always done so) but that capital gushes out of manufacturing and into
>> banking.
>
>
>
>