Quote of the day 26th April 2017
Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria
Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the...
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would you like to run me though the fiat currency system we have in place at the moment again please.
this would be an interesting night.
Both currencies backed by specie (as the pound was when we were on the Gold Standard) and fiat currency will produce disastrous and entirely predictable results when the monetary authorities do something daft such as vastly increase the amount of money in circulation with no appropriate control mechanisms to protect the value of the currency, and that applies whether we are talking about debasing the coinage in a specie-based system, printing vast quantities of notes and coin which bear no relation to the productive capacity of the economy, or failing to have minimally competent bank regulation.
You can cause serious inflation in a specie or other commodity based currency system if incompetent fools are running the economy and there are examples from history of this happening: you can crash a fiat money system and cause hyperinflation if incompetent fools are running the economy. The means of avoiding either are relatively obvious and have usually been well understood.
I do not buy the "anti-expert" argument that economists did not predict the 2008 crash - we may not have known exactly when the day of reckoning would come but there were plenty of warnings both from the IFS and other economists, and indeed from intelligent lay sources, that allowing the banks to invest ridiculous amounts in sub-prime US mortgages while government borrowing was dangerously high would sooner or later lead to trouble.
The most recent example of hyperinflation is Venezuela today and sadly Jeremy Corbyn has not learned from the mistake of praising the incompetent regime responsible.
Agree with you about socialism.