Money Realisation?

Thanks for this by Will Hutton in the Guardian:

"Eighty years ago, faced with today's economic events, nobody would have been in any doubt: we would obviously be living through a crisis in capitalism. Instead, there is a collective unwillingness to call a spade a spade. This is variously a crisis of the European Union, a crisis of the euro, a debt crisis or a crisis of political will. It is all those things, but they are subplots of a much bigger story: the way capitalism has been conceived and practised for the last 30 years has hit the buffers. Unless and until that is recognised, western economies will be locked in stagnation which could even transmute into a major economic disaster.

Simply put, the world has trillions upon trillions of excessive private debt financed by too many different currencies whose risk is allegedly mitigated by even more trillions of financial bets which in aggregate do not minimise the systemic risk one iota. This entire financial edifice, underwritten by tiny amounts of capital, has been created over three decades backed by the theory that markets do not make mistakes. Capitalism is best conceived and practised, runs the theory, by hunter-gatherer bankers and entrepreneurs owing no allegiance to the state or society."

So

1 Excessive private debt. Banks owns to states, banks loans to you and me, our credit cards, our mortgages. Live now!

2 Financial bets, or out and out gaming in false money, with the lucky fall back that if you loose it the general public will bail you out! Oh yeh!

But what I want to know is, where is the REAL money, the stuff that was printed and handed out to you and me so we could trade in our daily lives. When we can get back to the purpose of money - to facilitate bartering, then we will be getting somewhere. When we can run down the ridiculous ideas of a finance "industry" with "products" we will be getting somewhere.

And also in the Guardian, the comments by John Chubb:

"With the limitations on world resources, we can already appreciate that we need to think in terms of sustainability. We also need to consider what will make us happier and more contented with our society, rather than have new, shiny consumer goods. This is likely to require intellectual as well as technical innovation and this is more likely to arise with small, fleet-of-foot, start-up companies rather than from the research labs and manufacturing operations of large corporations."

And this is another aspect of Government policy which is not addressed, you cannot leave the economy to set itself to by favouring huge corporate mergers and conglomerates. You have to have specific policies to built a diversified business activity. In this way more people will feel engaged and subsequently be more productive. Think Hong Kong. Think China. Think fast developing nations?