Are The Greens the new Raving Loony Party!

Having watched the Positive Money clip. I went and read the Positive Money document.
2joz611prdme3eogq61h5p3gr08.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Creating_a_Sovereign_Monetary_System_Web20130615.pdf I think all those enthusiastic about Positive Money would be less so if they did the same.

Here is the bad news: The Positive Money scheme proposes that:
1) All current accounts will be interest free
2) The depositor protection on saving accounts is removed. If your bank/building society goes bust, bang go all your savings
3) The end of all Instant Access accounts
4) If you want to save money and earn interest you must trust your money to the bank for a fixed term with limited access. You will have to make a decision to invest it into a specific industrial or other sector of your choice and your investment and income will depend on the success of your choice. No more broad brush savings accounts with a stated rate of interest tied to Bank Rate.

This scheme completely ignores the needs and requirements of ordinary savers. Our needs and requirements are not even mentioned or considered anywhere in the document.

The first paragraph of the document states that the plans for Positive Money are based on ideas espoused and promulgated by Milton Friedman. Remember him? He was the high priest of Thatcherism, the monetarist guru whose policies led to the decimation of our industrial base andwas the cause of the high unemployment of the 1980s. The bad news listed above is classic monetarist policy.

You may want to return to the 1980s. I most emphatically do not.

I've claimed benefits in the past, when I was a working single parent. The top-up to my pay was vital to enable me to support my family and pay the bills. I think I got about £20 a week extra.

But reducing the amount of benefit a family can claim from £26,000 p.a. to £23,000 seems reasonable to me. Most families I know where both parents work don't earn anything like that amount.

I'd like to know how the Green Party's proposal to pay everyone £71 a week regardless of their assets is going to help the economy - how are they going to pay for it?

How is anything paid for in Cloud Cuckoo Land? Barter?

Don't worry, ana we will all be going back to the Good Life in our large Surbiton gardens

Thank you FlicketyB.

All parties have policies that make sense to individuals and some that don't. Why single out the greens? Do you think Cameron's policies make for a peaceful, safe and equitable world? We don't describe those as "loony" - just as policies we disagree with. Clinging to the idea of growth and privatisation seem utterly loony to me.

I think other threads will probably discuss the loony policies of the other parties in the next 99 days (can't wait [ hmm])

I came out equally in favour of the Greens and 3 other parties in that quiz, so where does that leave me? Completely mixed up! Or in favour of a true coalition.

Mishap, any one making sense of a policy that quite explicitly states that it will throw small savers to the wolves doesn't make sense to me.

Just for clarification, when I mentioned Cameron's first in PPE I was answering a specific point that had been raised; I was not suggesting that studying economics was of any practical use at all (except perhaps to get a job).

One person's sound economics is another person's disaster.
As has been proved.

Have the Greens changed their policies since Natalie Bennett took over, or are they pursuing the same policies that they did under Caroline Lucas?
Perhaps someone will know.

*Rosequartz you are confusing what a policy is and how it works with whether it is likely to be successful or not.

If you have a headache you can take one of a range of pain killers; aspirin, ibuprofen, paracetamol etc. Each of these pills contains specified chemicals that will clear a headache in a specific way. You cannot argue over which pain killing substance is in each tablet or how they work. Where there is room for argument and disagreement is over which is the best one for the specific headache you have and will be most effective.

It is the same with Positive Money.The facts are that Positive Money is a monetarist policy. This is a system that works by controlling the money supply in the economy. In Mrs Thatcher's time this was done through the ordinary banking system. PM supporters want it done through the Central Bank. The implementation of this policy means, as I said, no bank support for savers deposits, no Instant Access account etc.

These are facts published in the PM document. The opinion bit only comes in when you discuss whether you think these policies will work and whether they will solve our economic problems, the One person's sound economics is another person's disaster point. The facts of what the policy is and how it will be implemented is quite separate from the discussion about whether it will be effective

There are times when the down sides of a policy out way its advantages. That of course, again, is a matter of opinion.

Flickety I did the quiz - was it on this thread? which asked you which policies you were most in agreement with from six different parties on various topics, education, welfare, nhs, economy etc. My result came out in support of 25% for each of four different parties, that is why my brain is confused.

Simplistic I know, but it was interesting. It did not tell you which policies were of which party of course.

1) I meant out weigh, not out way!

2) rosequartz I vaguely remember doing the quiz with much the same result.

One of them was the Greens, but I definitely did not pick their policy on the economy.

I do like to hug an occasional tree though.

or boldly go for one of the others.

I think it did tell you which policies belonged to which party if you dug a bit deeper, rosequartz. Or perhaps that was only if you had your results emailed to you?

I am used to the German green party, who I have voted for sometimes in local elections. This party sounds more Communist than Green.
What on earth has the Green party to do with the monarchy? The greenest person UK has ever had is Prince Charles.

I thought they sounded as if they tended towards communism too, MargaretX

And perhaps Prince Charles should be the leader of the Greens. But then he might have to get rid of the monarchy. What a conundrum!

I didn't see that, ana

Anyone who votes for the Green Party is likely to have been a Labour supporter in the past, so the Green votes will be taking away from the Labour vote , which is a good thing IMO. As another poster said, cloud cuckoo land [a lot of the Green policies.]

FlicketyB is quite right when she says that 'the downside of some policies outweigh the advantages'. You have to imagine some of the Green Party policies in action...... though I would prefer not to .

FlicketyB I am working my way through the very long link that you posted and haven't read enough yet to fully comment on the points you raised re protection of deposits, lack of instant access, etc.

What I would say, though, is that the Financial Services Compensation Scheme was only introduced in 2001 so presumably there was no protection for savers until that time. In 2001 the maximum amount protected was £31,700 and now it is £85,000 (£170,000 in the case of a joint account), and new provisions have been made to protect large deposits in certain circumstances, e.g. during house sale/purchase, divorce settlements, etc.

Doesn't that suggest that these measures had to be introduced because private banks were printing money by extending loans and credit to individuals and businesses that ultimately could not repay those loans. Despite packaging up these "toxic" loans and selling them on, the chickens finally came home to roost, hence the 2008 crash.

Concerns are being expressed in many quarters that banks are again running out of control and encouraging potentially unsustainable lending("£,250,000,000 - amount of extra debt added in November - more than any month since credit crunch of 2008 ...... a massive looming personal debt crisis"). What will deter them from behaving in this way if they know that their customers' money is protected by the government?

Of course, if one has savings (we have and my mum has very substantial savings) it is natural to be worried about suggestions that they will not be protected in the event of a bank failing. But it is also pretty worrying to think that a government (on behalf of the UK's population) could be underwriting potentially billions of pounds to compensate for the mismanagement of financial institutions. Were that to happen, everybody in the country would pay for that protection for depositors, including people who had no savings at all.

I don't know what the answer is. All I do know is economists themselves didn't predict the 2008 mess and don't seem to be that sure themselves exactly what is happening or what should be done about the banking system. Positive Money may be way off track with their suggestions but at least they're trying to find solutions to a problem that everyone else seems to be pushing under the carpet.

What a minefield!

As to the greens having some policies that might seem unacceptable - does that not apply to all the parties? Is it possible to vote for a party whose policies are all to your liking?

Here's an interesting article about voting for the Green Party.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/ian-sinclair/defending-status-quo-labour-and-leftist-responses-to-green-surge

Eloethan I am sorry to disappoint you but the introduction of depositor protection had absolutely nothing to do with the banking crisis of 2008, apart from anything else in 2001, bank failure seemed almost inconceivable.

In 1994 an European Union Directive required all member states to have a deposit guarantee scheme for at least 90% of the deposited amount, up to at least 20,000 euro per person. Britain is a member of the EU. Britain has a deposit protection scheme.

Deposit protection covers individual savers only and covers only money invested as cash savings. It doesn't cover investments in unit trusts, investment trusts or a range of other products. It also covers money saved in a range of financial institutions including building societies, not just banks.

Most of the money in banks comes from companies, corporate bodies and all kinds of other sources. The idea that the deposit protection scheme for individual savers encourages bank to lend unsafely is farcical.

As for the injustice to tax payers without savings accounts having to pay for those that do, that applies to almost everything our taxation is used for. I could ask why my taxation should subsidise those people getting housing benefit or unemployment or disablement benefits? Neither I nor anyone in my family has ever received any of them.

There is however something called social justice and if you were to consult with the many gransnetters living on small incomes with perhaps £10,000, probably much less, in a bank or building society, a relatively small amount, but crucial to their economic well-being, I do not think they would be as cavalier as you are about Instant Access accounts and depositor protection.

Economists didn't see 2008 coming? Oh yes an awful lot of them did. If you were to go back through the financial papers and money and business sections of Daily papers or listened to the radio, from roughly 2000 onwards you would have seen article after article warning about the problems in the financial sector and the danger of out of control lending to both individuals and industry. It was back then we had all those tv programmes about individuals with a lot of debt and Alvin Hall and others tried to make people understand the dangers of debt. These programmes arose from the general unease in many quarters about what was happening over reckless lending.

Obviously many in the banking sector took no notice of these warnings. They were making hay while the sun shone. Although, again, a number of banks were more cautious, Nationwide, for example and several others.

More importantly, the people who were also choosing to ignore them were our politicians. They were surfing on the tsunami of money coming the government's way and instead of damping markets down they were spending money like confetti, convinced that the good times would keep on rolling to get them out of trouble. As Peter Mandelson said; 'I am intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes'. I understand he now regrets the remark.

Sorry for such a long post but this is a complicated subject and there are no simple solutions to complicated problems.

It's strange how people only remember the first half of Mandelson's statement. Lots of accountants must have been laughing at him knowing that they were complicit in making sure the second part did not happen.
They are the ones who are still making hay, telling us that they need big pay packets and bonuses to keep them in their jobs.
Sickening.

Wouldn't argue with that