Saturday, February 28, 2015

Reforming Money and Banking: Keys to Debt and Jubilee - Tikkun Magazine

A moral component is currently lacking in all platforms in high-frequency trading, derivatives, and dark pools in today’s electronic global financial casino.

The structural instabilities of laissez-faire, market-dominated societies became abundantly apparent during the widespread financial crises and debt-driven credit meltdown on Wall Street in 2008. Instead of addressing these instabilities at their root, however, many governments shredded safety nets, cut jobs, and imposed misguided “austerity” programs.

Clearly we need to explore new options. The movement for Jubilee is pragmatic since history proves that as borrowed money flows upward to the lenders, debts become unrepayable.

As in the game of monopoly, the upward accumulation of money, power, and information inevitably ends in “game over.” The calls for Jubilee are a way to restart the game. They also reintroduce the moral component missing from economic textbooks and mathematical models, which have been raised to dangerous levels of abstraction in artificial intelligence and computerized, algorithm-based trading.

A moral component is currently lacking in all platforms in high-frequency trading, derivatives, and dark pools in today’s electronic global financial casino. Ironically, these new platforms were all made possible by taxpayers through their subsidization of communications technologies, satellites, the internet, and financial infrastructure, as documented in The Entrepreneurial State (2013).

The full article is available here