i promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of...

Generali

ninky wrote: »

"banknotes are backed by securities".....do they mean loans??!!

Yes they mean, for the most part, loans to foreign Governments (Government bonds):

9.9 EEA assets need to be highly liquid so that they can be made available quickly for intervention purposes (or other permitted uses) if necessary. Inevitably, these assets (other than gold) carry some element of credit risk. In order to keep this risk at a low level and to ensure a high level of liquidity, the funds of the EEA are predominantly invested in securities issued or guaranteed by the national governments of the United States, euro-area countries and Japan and in the debt instruments of highly-rated banks.

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/bud08_debtreserves_617.pdf

The EEA is the Exchange Equalisation account which held £58,000,000,000 at the end of December 2007. It will be a lot higher now I would imagine as bond and gold prices have risen.

John_Pierpoint

Generali wrote: »

It does suggest that.

There is an historical idea that says that when the Conquistadores (sp) went to South America and brought back a load of Gold that created inflation and wrecked the Spanish economy. I have my doubts but it is a commonly held theory.

The way I see it is that economies will do well and they'll do badly from time to time. People will see an economy doing badly or well and try to fit a theory backwards to what happened.

Generally speaking, Government imposing too many taxes will ruin an economy. Then again, too little Government is also a mess in the end. Government isn't snake oil.

The Government can take taxes from you under threat of imprisonment and spend it how you see fit, remembering that every pound that the Government takes makes the economy a few pence less efficient as it messes with price signals in the market.

You will find this programme interesting:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/JO391t6cRtGxstjbE4EEmg

Syphilis didn't do much to help either - it certainly had a debilitating effect on the Venetian economy, bit like current day AIDS in Africa.

John_Pierpoint

ninky wrote: »

i would say with money the value it represents is likely to fluctuate to a greater extent than other concrete assests like land. just in terms of bartering, land is likely to hold its value against food for example. it's not like everyone has to be confident in land for it to be worth something (although obviously you need to be confident in the laws of the land to a certain extent). with currency it really could just become worthless overnight. the lopinion of the ikelihood of this happening probably depends how many tin foil hats you have in your wardrobe.

Land is the ideal thing to tax.

However the powerful people in our country tend to have more than their fair share of it, so don't expect it to be heavily taxed in the near future.

http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/hodgkiss-f-t_on-stamford-raffles.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George

ninky_2

John_Pierpoint wrote: »

Land is the ideal thing to tax.

However the powerful people in our country tend to have more than their fair share of it, so don't expect it to be heavily taxed in the near future.

http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/hodgkiss-f-t_on-stamford-raffles.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George

indeed. i believe my local mp is supporting a land tax as suggested by vince cable also.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/09/27/lammy-call-for-land-tax-115875-22590316/

Bullfighter

John_Pierpoint wrote: »

Land is the ideal thing to tax.

However the powerful people in our country tend to have more than their fair share of it, so don't expect it to be heavily taxed in the near future.

http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/hodgkiss-f-t_on-stamford-raffles.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George

The Magna Carta made sure that would never happen.

John_Pierpoint

Yes the Magna Carta was an agreement between the country's top tenants and its land owner to go easy on the council tax because his brother had got involved in a failing military adventure and near bankrupted the country. [The legal punctuation is deliberate].

That sounds familiar.

Interestingly the land tax is being promoted by a graduate of that American meritocratic institution set up with the help of agricultural surplus from an English shire county in the 1600's?

Time to go back to the diggers of St Georges Hill and the "common treasury" etc.?

http://www.stgeorgesra.com/

http://www.bilderberg.org/land/diggers.htm

[It is strange the things I've learned on this part of the forum & the bedfellows you find with a singe Google]

I expect there is a bit of panic on St Georges Hill about the pending loss of child allowance.

Norfolk_Jim

Trouble is, its a loaded question so that you can burble on about the gold standard and stuff like that