Comments on: We’ll bail out Wall St, but let’s leave climate change to the market

By: Marilyn

Marilyn — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

The sick joke on the OZ is that all their websites state they will be carbon neutral by 2010 and then publish all this denialist crap.

By: Dr Harvey M Tarvydas

Dr Harvey M Tarvydas — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

Pamela be aggravated. You’re wasting your time. They can’t hear you and if they did they can’t understand. Hey “no thought as to the rest of us” relates to 1 in 10 of us are born psychopaths; they are deaf to the idea of us.
But not all red is red. Republican Reagan had one pink socialist moment (none are possible in Australia as both sides live in mortal fear of having one exposed) also with banks. He, early on, issued a Presi decree that all banks wishing to keep their banking licenses will devote 20% of total loan funds to venture capital. This and an accompanying federal government fund put the US into leadership orbit in that era of new technology. All this was monitored for the Presi by Harvard Business Faculty. You can be pragmatic, clever, innovative in a modern English speaking democracy but not an outright pink or red socialist unless you are a US republican Presi, a totally unfair advantage.
Its psychology not truth that matters.

By: jack andrews

jack andrews — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

Jeff Sparrow is abosolutely spot on. The screams from the pointy heads about any money dedicated to climate change mitigation are unheard when the ‘market’ requires massive hand outs so the rich can keep their mansions. Where are the market heads from the IPA and every other so called ‘rational’ institution when we need them.? Answer-they are waiting to pounce on the next meagre boost to welfare spending, or to try to shaft money going towards renewable energy, tell us public traonsprot is too expensive to fix - or some other such worthy cause. This exposes the entire right wing nut-case skeptic arguments on climate change and those of their corporate buddies as deliberate deception and hypocracy. The last thing we need now is a merchant frikkin banker and a pro-business labor lite type to run the show. We need people who are prepared to shaft the corporate climate fiends just as enthusiastically as ‘business’ seem to be able to shaft the ordinary punter when the ‘market’ needs intervention. And we are supposed to be worried about the paltry effects climate change policy is purported to have on the economy? Please-give me a break…700 billion would buy a lot of solar power- but I guess that would that be too distorting for the market…

By: pamela

pamela — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

Well said Jeff. 700 Billion to keep our generation in comfort but no money to keep the air and water healthy for the next generation.
The thing that really aggravates me is that we are supposed to actually support these bastards who have feathered their nests with no thought as to the rest of us.
Life in the third world has just become even more impoverished and unbearable while USA economic systemic flirted with itself.

By: Lucy

Lucy — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

I concur with Vaclav Klaus that the end of the Soviet Union was not about climatology. But it seems a bit spurious to extend the same conclusion to climate change.

Let’s challenge the Oz: if you don’t believe in climate change to the point where you are running this kind of crap week in, week out, why don’t you move your editorial offices the hell away to Niue or somewhere? Money, meet mouth.

By: Kevin Cox

Kevin Cox — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

It is obvious why we have a financial crisis. The reason is that we have given the responsibility of creating most of our money to the banks. Once upon a time governments took responsibility for creating money. Some of us remember the credit crunches. Now we let banks decide how much credit to issue and have they taken advantage of it. Many of the loans that people now take out are loans to buy loans. What a load of nonsense. It is obvious to most of us that taking out a loan to buy loans is compounding the risk of the initial loan but the banks who are supposed to experts in risk management fail to see this.

Banks are allowed to lend 10 times the amount of money they have on deposit. This again is a recipe for disaster. Stop the banks lending more than they have on deposit. That is, before a bank can lend some money then it should have money on deposit.

If more money is needed to keep the economy going then let the Reserve Bank issue some money. When this money is issued it should be at zero interest until it has been spent to create an asset that is worth something.

Have a look at http://cscoxk.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/financing-renewables-and-solving-the-financial-crisis/ to see how to do this.

This will bring some discipline to the financial markets and stop the proliferation of financial instruments which treat money as though it were a commodity rather than a measure of an asset. It will also give us a way to get things like renewable energy infrastructure built economically. This is a better form of encouraging investment in renewables than encouraging investment through selling emissions permits.