Peter Lennon

[Prof. Steve Keen @ProfSteveKeen]

My Reaction To The Newest Nobel Economics Prize Travesty https://t.co/9jJCtvuf5U by Michael Hudson

[Steve Hall @ProfHall1955]

I have 18k followers. 900 views. This is too close to the bone and being throttled. Give it a boost! https://t.co/Sd5RRRTxw8

[David__Osland @David__Osland]

Thatcherism devastated the UK's industrial base, put three million people on the dole and plunged entire communities into the kind of poverty they still haven't recovered from four decades later. Kemi Badenoch is offering us a repeat performance.

[Patchris @DanisonPatience]

My 6-year-old daughter once asked me if we could invite her “real mother” to dinner.

I froze.

“Your real mother?”

She nodded.

“Yes, Mommy. Daddy says she is my real mother.”
I tried to laugh it off, but she continued.

“She comes when you’re at work. Sometimes she buys me chocolate. One day, Daddy even drove me and her home because it was late.”

I smiled and said, “Wow. That’s a big surprise.”
Then I added, “Let’s play a little game. We’ll invite her for dinner on Sunday, but don’t tell Daddy. It will be our little secret.”

I was a nurse working night shifts, so I swapped duties with a colleague that Sunday.

Instead of leaving for work, I quietly came back through the back door and waited in my room.

A few minutes later, there was a knock.
I heard the door open.
Then my daughter screamed happily:

[Steve Hall @ProfHall1955]

A must-watch. @ProfSteveKeen runs us through the private debt-leveraging-tech bubble process - exacerbated by Chinese open access and the Strait of Hormuz debacle - leading us to the next crash. Neil is a different person in the company of someone who actually knows his stuff.

[Prof. Steve Keen @ProfSteveKeen]

"Only 1 in 10 US tech firms will survive the AI collapse" | Andrew Neil and I discuss the AI overbuild and China dilemmas. https://t.co/5uKy9qyzK3 via @YouTube

[Thanos Angelopoulos @Th_Angelopoulos]

You are financially illiterate af, @PeterMcCormack.

You say "we aren't seeing productivity gains". Wrong. UK productivity rose 87% between 1981 and 2019. Median wages rose only 62%. A 25 percentage point gap. Three-fifths of that gap is down to rising inequality (LSE POID, 2021). The productivity gains happened. They flowed upward.

That is @garyseconomics's argument. Wealth generates passive income. Passive income buys more assets. More assets generate more passive income. It compounds. Returns on capital run at 4–5% historically while economic growth sits at 1–1.5%. Wealth concentrates even as the pie grows. You do not need a zero-sum economy for that.
https://t.co/wEPhwkqv38

You say billionaires "create companies, products and services". Some do.

But look at where the compounding actually happens:

-Over 2 million council homes sold under Right to Buy since 1980.
-Social renters halved from 31% to 16% of English households.
-More than 4 in 10 of those sold homes are now owned by private landlords charging market rents.
-Those homes are now worth £430 billion.
-1.29 million households sit on waiting lists.

The government is set to pay private landlords £73 billion in housing benefit over five years. That is six times what it spends on building affordable homes. Councils spent £2.8 billion on temporary accommodation in 2024/25 alone, up 118% in five years. Public money flowing directly into private pockets because we sold off the housing stock and never replaced it.
https://t.co/KoSFzoe3PX
https://t.co/nDheNWwHQZ
https://t.co/04nTI0D64n

Water was privatised debt-free in 1989 with a £1.5 billion government gift. Since then, over £72 billion extracted in dividends. The companies have loaded themselves with over £60 billion in debt. Bills are up 40% in real terms. 28% of the average water bill goes to shareholder returns and debt servicing. No new reservoirs built since privatisation.

Across water, energy, rail and mail, almost £200 billion has been paid to shareholders since the 1990s. Energy network firms averaged 55% profit margins from 2020 to 2024. Nearly a quarter of the average energy bill in 2024, roughly £416, was profit. The rail industry received half its income from taxpayers in 2023/24, but the profits still went to private owners.

These are not "companies, products and services" you are describing. These are public assets sold to private capital, generating guaranteed passive income streams extracted from captive customers who have no alternative. That is the compounding loop @garyseconomics is describing, and you walked straight past it.

https://t.co/IKpHtDIUNy
https://t.co/grjo9QHo5y

Real median wages are still 2% below 2008 at April 2025 (ONS). In 212 out of 340 local authorities, pay packets are worth less than 16 years ago. House prices sit at 7.9x median household income in England. UK billionaires grew from 15 in 1990 to 165 in 2024. The top 50 richest families hold more wealth than the poorest half of the population. 34 million people. The longest pay squeeze since the Napoleonic wars, and you think the problem is too much government.
The post-war era (1950–73) had the highest taxes, heaviest regulation, strongest unions, and an extensive welfare state. It produced the fastest, most broadly shared growth in modern British history. Regional inequality hit its lowest point in the 20th century. The deregulation experiment since 1979 gave us all of the above. "Less government" was tried. This is the result.

https://t.co/AsKYFuynge
https://t.co/MiLsz30gfD
https://t.co/OdCMlVrKGv

Where I differ from @garyseconomics: the answer is not a wealth tax. A wealth tax skims the returns after the fact. The answer is to take the cash-flowing assets back. Socialise housing. Stop paying private landlords £73 billion and build public stock that generates rental income for the state, which funds more building, which generates more income. The same compounding loop, reversed. Public ownership of water, energy networks, rail. Assets that are natural monopolies with captive customers and guaranteed revenue. Every pound of dividends currently leaving the country to sovereign wealth funds and private equity is a pound that could be compounding for the public. You do not break a feedback loop by taxing its output. You break it by owning the input.

Peter, you told Gary you are writing a book to "help him understand these basic ideas". You just demonstrated that you do not understand the difference between wealth creation and rent extraction. You do not understand how passive income compounds through asset ownership. You do not understand that the era you are nostalgic for, the one with less regulation and lower taxes, produced the worst wage outcomes in over two centuries. These are not advanced concepts. These are the basics. You are not ready to write a book. You are not ready to write a pamphlet. Pipe down.

[Prof. Steve Keen @ProfSteveKeen]

Two types of money. One comes with a chain. One does not.

When a bank gives you a mortgage, it creates money.

But every dollar comes with decades of repayment. That is money with a chain.

You spend carefully. You save defensively. You slow down.

When the government runs a deficit, it also creates money.

But that money lands in private bank accounts with no debt attached. That is money without a chain.

You spend freely. Commerce picks up.

In the 1950s and 60s, private debt was low. Government spending put debt-free money into the economy. People spent. Growth was real.

Then economists told politicians to slash deficits and let the private sector fill the gap.

The private sector filled it. With debt.

Household borrowing exploded. The economy ran on money that people were terrified to spend.

That is how you build a subprime bubble. That is how you get 2008.

The economy does not just need money. It needs money people are free to use.

Economists spent 50 years trying to eliminate exactly that.

So for a more comprehensive understanding, refer to the full video presentation given in the comments.

#SteveKeen #MoneyCreation #PrivateDebt #GovernmentSpending #PostKeynesian #Economics

[The Heartlands Tribune @HeartlandsTrib]

It's fascinating to watch: Tribe Over Reality: The Art of the Political Fog

Who do they think they are talking to? I ask because when you watch the modern political class defend its choices, you are left with the chilling realisation that they are no longer speaking to the public at all. They are speaking to their own reflection, reciting dogmas to comfort themselves in the dark.

Take the recent exchange between former MEP Lucy Harris @Lugey6 and Dr Jeevun Sandher MP @JeevunSandher . It was a tiny vignette, a passing moment of television, but it contained the entire pathology of our managed democracy.

Harris made a point that any shopkeeper, any small haulier, any person who has ever had to sign the front of a paycheck understands intuitively: if you increase the tax burden on employment through National Insurance, you make businesses cautious. You raise the barrier to expansion, and you inevitably squeeze out those at the very bottom of the ladder, the young people looking for their first break.

The response from Dr Sandher, a Labour MP and an economist, was not a defence of the policy's merits. It was a verbal evasion. He repeated, with the flat certainty of a man reading a spreadsheet in a windowless room, that the rise "did not apply to young people".

The Mechanics of the Evasion

This is where the fog rolls in. It is a peculiar kind of Orwellian sophistry that seeks to decouple an action from its inevitable consequence. The question is not whether the tax is stamped directly onto the pay packet of an 18-year-old. The question is whether increasing the overarching cost of human labour makes an employer less likely to expand.

It is basic maths, though it appears to be a branch of mathematics the Treasury has long since abandoned.

When a state increases the price of doing business, capital does not simply absorb the blow out of civic benevolence. It retrenches. And when a business retrenches, who is the first to suffer? It is always the young. They are the untested; they are the risk. They are the easiest not to hire, the easiest to leave standing outside the gate while the state celebrates its fiscal prudence.

This is the reality for anyone who can ask a question using a search engine: UK youth unemployment has surged to a multi-year high, with the rate for 16 to 24-year-olds hitting 16.2%, its highest level since January 2015. Currently, over 1 million young Britons (13.5%) are classified as NEET (not in education, employment, or training).

To acknowledge this would require admitting an uncomfortable truth: that neoliberal tax adjustments have real, human costs. But the modern partisan cannot admit error. Instead, we are treated to a secondary layer of obfuscation. Dr Sandher proudly informed us that "employment was rising" because more people are leaving "inactivity" to look for work.

Let us look at that phrase through an unvarnished lens. If a person leaves a state of economic inactivity and enters the market looking for a job, but cannot find one because businesses are too heavily taxed to expand, they have not been rescued. They have simply been reclassified. They have moved from one column of state failure to another. To call this an "outcome" and a "good record" is to treat unemployment as a triumph, provided it is dressed in sufficiently clinical language.

Slogans are Not a Substitute for Solvency

The defenders of the current orthodoxies will argue that these measures are necessary to stabilise the public finances, that the state must raise revenue from somewhere, and that targeted exemptions protect the vulnerable. They will tell you that the macroeconomic indicators show resilience.

But these indicators do not feed a family, nor do they provide a career to a school leaver. The fundamental flaw in this managerial vanity is the belief that you can regulate and tax a market into prosperity while ignoring the human element at the bottom of the structure. You cannot solve a crisis by refusing to look at the wreckage.

We have seen this film before, under different managements, both Tory and Labour, but with the same script. The names at the top change, but the basic grasp of how an economy actually functions, of how real people earn their bread and keep their shops open, remains entirely absent from the Westminster bubble.

The Reality of the Market: Employers do not hire out of charity; they hire when expansion is viable.

The Fiction of the State Slogans about reducing inactivity are meaningless if the jobs do not exist on the other side of the ledger.

The Cost of Complacency: When political self-defence replaces genuine economic analysis, the public pays the price.

A System Driven Past Its Tolerance

This is what system failure looks like in its quietest, most mundane moments. It is not a sudden collapse, but a gradual, numbing accumulation of rhetoric over reality. If our representatives cannot own the consequences of a bad decision, or even comprehend the friction it creates on the high street, they cannot repair the damage.

You cannot feed young people statistics and pretend they are opportunities. You cannot treat the working class as walking cash machines for the Treasury while closing off their paths to self-reliance. This is not governing; it is merely managing decline while calling it progress.

"They tell us the numbers are healthy, but when a state trains its politicians to value the neatness of a column over the reality of the street, it hasn’t delivered progress, it has simply learned to lie with a straight face."

There are alternatives...

Incentivise employers to take on and train young people. Build proper vocational colleges in every region. Give young people the skills employers actually need, without forcing them into a lifetime of student debt.

Make them an asset.

Train the bricklayer, the engineer, the coder, the carer, the welder, the electrician, the mechanic, the nurse, the technician and the builder. Give employers confidence and give young people a route into dignity, wages and purpose.

That is how you create a working relationship between employer and worker.

Not by taxing jobs, then pretending slogans are employment policy.

A serious country does not leave its young people outside the factory gate and call it progress.

It trains them, backs them, employs them, and builds the future with their hands.

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

Destroying the @InternetArchive's @WayBackMachine would be the equivalent of the burning of the Library of Alexandria - one of the worst losses of knowledge in history.

Media giants are now threatening to do this.

We can't let this happen.

Pass it on.

[Prof. Steve Keen @ProfSteveKeen]

https://t.co/OzStKLy3kK

[Museum of Care @museumofcare]

Prof Steve Keen and Prof Michael Hudson will give a talk about the Global Crisis we currently face.

Streamed on our Youtube Channel.

Friday, 27th March

https://t.co/J7HTzBSOKv

[James Schneider @schneiderhome]

“A nation run this way cannot be sovereign. Its secrets leak upward. Its wealth flows outward. Its politics is for sale.”

My piece on Mandelson as the most perfect expression of Britain’s captured political system.

https://t.co/ixtSK7L2TD

[Steve Hall @ProfHall1955]

President Xi is on the same page as Michael Hudson here - abstracted financial capitalism is 'killing the host'. We need a morally and socially driven financial system focused on investment in the real economy of production and services.
https://t.co/UuF73nZAue

[Prof. Steve Keen @ProfSteveKeen]

A meaningful life is spent pursuing goals so great that one might “perish” in the attempt, rather than living safely but shallowly.
- Nietzsche

[Jostein Hauge @haugejostein]

During my undergraduate studies in economics, the students most sceptical of the mathematical models were often those who had transferred from engineering and actually understood the maths.

The rest of us just blindly consumed the maths and felt pretty smug because we thought we were doing something scientific.

It’s no coincidence that some of the most prominent heterodox economists either use mathematics to poke holes in neoclassical models or have a strong background in mathematics or physics — such as Steve Keen, Ben Fine, and Tony Lawson, to name a few.

[David Graeber Institute @Graeber_social]

Michael Hudson on the problem of how an economy that just works for just for the Finance sector - is holding everything back.

[New Left EViews @NewLeftEViews]

In my experience, the sounder your understanding of mathematics the more you are likely to frown at how modern academic economics uses mathematical models.

[Prof. Steve Keen @ProfSteveKeen]

Top Economist Warns US "Elon Musk's Magic Money is Wrong" @elonmusk @tedcruz

[LC Kiwi 🇳🇿 @LongCovidKiwi]

There are two foolproof methods of finding out who your real friends are:

1) Experience sudden financial ruin
2) Get a Chronic Illness (like #LongCovid)

I don’t recommend either option, but they sure are effective at shining a light on who stands by you, and who does not.