Freelance aerospace, defence and tech writer, sceptical observer of economics. #MMT, #JobGuarantee, #ModernJubilee, #JC4PM2019, #BlackLivesMatter, he/him
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Joined February 2009
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Peter Donaldson retweeted
If you want to understand why Washington is conducting Ukraine peace negotiations without the EU at the table, listen to Kaja Kallas's speech today.
She insists that Brussels must be involved in negotiations over Europe's future security, while simultaneously claiming that the continent already has an established security architecture based on NATO and the EU, into which Ukraine should simply be integrated.
But that's precisely the problem, because Russia, Europe's largest country and biggest nuclear power, is outside those institutions. And as Washington appears increasingly willing to acknowledge, any lasting settlement must address the security relationship between Russia and the rest of Europe.
Not to mention that if the existing arrangements were functioning adequately, Europe would hardly be experiencing its biggest war in generations (a child could see this, for crying out loud).
Nobody is suggesting that Moscow should have a complete veto over NATO (except maybe some very hardline fringe nationalists). but it's difficult to see how a lasting continental security settlement can be achieved without addressing the relationship between Russia and the blocs members, including the security concerns of both sides.
Kallas is perfectly entitled to demand a seat at the negotiating table (as are the British and the Turkish, for that matter), but insisting that the existing architecture is sufficient, without explaining how relations with Russia can be managed within it, doesn't seem a particularly constructive starting point.
The whole purpose of the negotiations is to establish a settlement that prevents another war, but simply defending the arrangements under which this one occurred will hardly do that?
Putin does not have a veto over European security.
Any agreement to end the war must prevent Russia from re-arming and re-attacking.
This is why earlier this year, I put forward a paper with core demands towards Moscow, which was discussed by EU Foreign Ministers. This should be the basis for any negotiations.
Concessions should be on the aggressor, not on the victim.
My press remarks in Warsaw alongside @sikorskiradek and @andrii_sybiha ↓
Peter Donaldson retweeted
Spot on 💯 ❗“Israel was just a religious mythology until 1948, when it was created by Zionist terrorism” #FreePalestine #Gaza
Peter Donaldson retweeted
German liberals: "We must take to the streets to stop the Nazis from the AfD!"
Also German liberals: "What Nazis in Ukraine? Let's send them more money and weapons!"
Peter Donaldson retweeted
“If you supply weapons to somebody that is accused of acts of genocide, then you yourself become complicit in those acts as well”
Retweet if you agree with Corbyn
Peter Donaldson retweeted
The word “deficit”, when referring to government finances, is descriptively correct in accounting terms but rhetorically misleading, because in ordinary English it carries the sense of a shortage, inadequacy or failure. In this context, however, it simply describes a difference between government expenditure and receipts over an accounting period. It does not mean that the government itself is “short” of money.
Compare:
“The government ran a £100bn deficit.”
with:
“The government added £100bn of net sterling financial assets to the non-government sector.”
They describe the same accounting outcome, yet provoke completely different intuitions.
This is not to say that all government deficits produce good economic outcomes. A deficit may contribute to inflation; the composition of spending may be wasteful; or fiscal policy may produce an undesirable distribution of resources. Equally, a deficit may accompany price stability; the composition of spending may promote efficiency and productive capacity; or fiscal policy may produce a desirable distribution of resources.
None of these outcomes necessarily follows from the fact that the government’s accounting balance carries a minus sign. It depends on the economic circumstances, the level and composition of spending and taxation, and the productive limits of the economy.
A government “deficit”, then, identifies a residual accounting balance, not a deficiency in the government’s finances. The mistake is to import the ordinary-language meaning of deficiency into a national-accounting identity.
Peter Donaldson retweeted
“The market of gilt buyers themselves fund the interest.”
The source of sterling to finance government, including coupon payments, is the Bank of England, which is wholly owned by the government. There’s no external source of finance.
Peter Donaldson retweeted
They have to, to argue for a non existant small state that would never work to justify unfair tax cuts for the wealthy, it's a game of who can hang on to their wealth for the longest and increase it, just because. Daniel knows all of this, but won't stop talking neoliberalism...
Peter Donaldson retweeted
Two things:
1. It's Hannan, wrong about everything.
2. It's the IEA with its secretly funded 🇺🇸 agenda.
Peter Donaldson retweeted
The monetary system isn’t a force of nature. It is a set of institutions, rules and policy choices designed by people. What people have designed, people can redesign. The question isn’t whether we can afford to change it, but whether we have the democratic will to do so.
Peter Donaldson retweeted
This is an extraordinary amount of economic confusion to pack into one graphic.
First, Britain does not need another 3.4 million taxpayers to provide the government with sterling. The British state is the sole issuer of sterling. It cannot involuntarily run out of its own currency in the way a household or a business can.
Second, debt interest is not money lost to the British economy. Every pound paid by the Government is a pound received by someone else. Government interest expenditure is income to the holders of government liabilities. The IEA is presenting one side of the accounting while conveniently ignoring the other.
Third, the recent increase in debt interest is substantially a consequence of higher interest rates and inflation indexation. The Bank of England as a matter of policy has increased the remuneration on reserves, consequently maturing government debt is being refinanced at higher yields. To describe all this as the inevitable price of excessive public spending is economically illiterate.
Finally, the comparison with the income tax liabilities of 18 million workers is designed to evoke the household-budget fallacy: the idea that government must first collect sufficient money from taxpayers before it can spend on public services.
It is a powerful political narrative, but a profoundly misleading description of how the monetary system operates.
If debt interest is genuinely your concern, discuss the interest-rate policies that determine much of its cost, who receives the payments, and their economic consequences.
But please stop pretending that Britain is running out of pounds.
Peter Donaldson retweeted
Late stage capitalism:
A supermarket throws perfectly good food in the dumpster, pays its workers so little they can barely afford groceries, then asks customers to donate to the food bank at checkout.
And we're supposed to admire how fucking efficient this system is.
Peter Donaldson retweeted
The financial secretary to the Treasury explains that the war on Iran is driving inflation so the Bank of England has put up interest rates.
How is making peoples mortgages more expensive going to make a barrel of oil cheaper?
Peter Donaldson retweeted
I'm hungry 😭
If you’re scrolling, PLEASE leave a dot . it's just a dot
chuffed.org/project/184385
Peter Donaldson retweeted
It takes a thousand years to build 3 centimetres of topsoil, and the world loses a football pitch of it every 5 seconds.
A third of the planet's farmable soil is already degraded. The UN's own warning was 60 harvests left.
Iowa, the richest ground in America, has lost close to half its topsoil since 1850, ploughed loose and sent down the Mississippi.
Warming gets the summits and the placards. The soil that grows 95% of your food is washing away right now, and that is the one that starves you.
The deepest, blackest, most fertile ground on earth, the American prairie, the Russian steppe, the Ukrainian black earth that feeds the world, was built by one thing.
Herds. Tens of millions of bison, trampling, dunging and moving on, over roots 15 feet deep, packing carbon into the ground for 10,000 years.
The plough switched that off. The cow, moved like the wild herd, switches it back on. Graze it right and the carbon sinks, the soil thickens, and the rain soaks in instead of tearing the field down the river.
A tractor cannot build soil. A fertiliser bag cannot build soil. Only the herd ever has.
So saving the world's dirt means more cattle on grass, not fewer, and the best machine ever built for the job is the animal they want off your plate.
You will hear about the cow's burp right up until the last of the topsoil reaches the sea.
Peter Donaldson retweeted
True. To the creditor-rentier parasites, recessions are useful bankruptcy auctions. Make the public so poor and indebted they have to sell off their assets for next to nothing. Eventually the parasites own everything essential and the public have to rent it all back. Cinch!
Raising interest rates to stop the private sector from spending £ will result in a recession.
The national debt will increase - profiting the bond markets with interest payments.
Then government austerity measures cut in because they’ll claim there isn’t enough “tax payers money” to fund public services.
The banksters then swoop to invest in care homes, the NHS and even council services like waste collections… paid for by increased council taxes.
So it goes like this
Energy Prices £⬆️
Energy Company Profits £⬆️
Household Finances £⬇️
Bond Market Investors £⬆️
(from BoE interest and deals to run public services)
Council Taxes £⬆️
Government Spending ⬇️
U.K. Economy ⬇️
Peter Donaldson retweeted
Raising interest rates to stop the private sector from spending £ will result in a recession.
The national debt will increase - profiting the bond markets with interest payments.
Then government austerity measures cut in because they’ll claim there isn’t enough “tax payers money” to fund public services.
The banksters then swoop to invest in care homes, the NHS and even council services like waste collections… paid for by increased council taxes.
So it goes like this
Energy Prices £⬆️
Energy Company Profits £⬆️
Household Finances £⬇️
Bond Market Investors £⬆️
(from BoE interest and deals to run public services)
Council Taxes £⬆️
Government Spending ⬇️
U.K. Economy ⬇️
In other words, this is saying that £2.3 Trillion of the government’s so called £3 Trillion debt has ended up as long term private sector savings and converted into government bonds. That conversation from simply being “savings” into a bond is what is incorrectly referred to as “borrowing”… it’s not borrowing it’s an investment by private investors!