Aristotle was right: you can’t make money out of money Amazing really: entirely missing the point that we all did start making money around 1750 when we did realise that as money has a time value you can indeed make money out of money. Next week, Ritchie’s GP wife lectures us on why Galen is

That would be Jerry Reed's "You make it, They take it" Income tax man’s a-knockin’ at my door And yellin’ money, money (money-money-money) Income tax man’s a-yellin’ for some more Money, money (money-money-money) [Chorus] ‘Cause when you make it they take it (money-money-money) You make it they take it (money-money-money) You make it they ta-a-a-ke it, they...

The MAPLight.org website is an independent database which seeks to expose the connection between money and politics in the USA. Contibutors include staff from the Institute on Money in State Politics, Center for Responsive Politics, Sunlight Foundation and Center for Governmental Studies. It enables citizens to track connections between campaign donations and legislative votes. The site includes n...

Of course, the Guardian isn't irredeemably in the pocket of the Labour Party. On Friday, they reported on the Electoral Commission's misgivings over Labour's new campaign finance proposals. Politics is irredeemably linked with money. Politicians spend money (ours, for the most part), raise money for campaigning, and tell people what they can or can't do with their money. As a Liberal Democrat, I

An increasingly desperate Government is now going to start up the presses and print money. "The Bank will create the money by buying government and corporate bonds from financial institutions for new supplies of sterling. Termed “quantitative easing”, it is the modern equivalent of printing money. It is designed to put more cash into the economy, creating more money for companies to sp...

Work secretary risks clash with unions over bid to take 'big money' out of politics Britain's leaders should "bite the bullet" and endorse state funding of political parties as part of an overhaul to remove "big money" from the system, the work and pensions secretary, James Purnell, declares today. In the latest high-profile contribution to the Guardian's A New Politics series,...

It appears that the Glorious Successor may soon have to save the world once more. The banks, which have absorbed almost forty thousand million pounds of taxpayers' money in the past few months, in return for being politely asked to start lending money again, have decided they'd rather just take the money, thank you very much. Accordingly, "options presented to the Treasury are thought to include

Once the millions of pennies start to drop that unlawfully derived income contained in council's accounts MUST be refunded the councils' spin machines will set to work saying that if they are forced to refund then that will mean cuts in services. Perhaps we should have a look and see where that money could really come from and let the ones whose failings have caused the problem have thei...

I’ll leave the economics of printing more money to those more qualified than I, but the politics of it seems appalling. Mike Smithson is right when he writes at Political Betting that: “...the notion of “printing money” sounds quite horrific - something that simply won’t be understood, surely, by 99% of the electorate and something that the Daily Mails of this world c...

I read recently that both in the US and the UK, a significant part of the "quantitative easing" is repurchasing sovereign debt from foreign holders. In other words, money is being created to buy back government bonds from overseas investors. This says two things to me: (a) the new money thus created is not going to help kick-start our economies, and (b) foreigners are losing confidence in us and w...