PBI Newsletter, July 2012 Edition

PBI Newsletter, July 2012 • PublicBankingInstitute.org • July 20, 2012

The PBI (Public Banking Institute) July Newsletter is here!
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PBI Newsletter, June 2012 Edition

PBI Newsletter, June 2012 • PublicBankingInstitute.org • June 22, 2012

The PBI (Public Banking Institute) June Newsletter is here!
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The Shots Heard Round the World: Why conservative economists are aghast at radical reforms by Argentina’s central bank.

Rick Rowden • http://www.foreignpolicy.com • July 3, 2012

At a time when most governments seem incapable of doing anything about unemployment, worsening economic inequality, and continuing financial instability, Argentina has adopted a set of striking new reforms that will enable its central bank to play a much more proactive role in addressing all of these problems. In fact, the reforms, adopted in March, may be the first shots fired in a quiet revolution in monetary policy. If successful, they could threaten to overturn 25 years of conservative central bank policies that have long been considered best practice by the IMF and central banks around the world.

Argentina’s new central bank president, Mercedes Marcó del Pont, said the reforms challenge the conservative axiom that central banks should play a very limited role in the economy. The bank is now rediscovering its sovereign capacity to formulate and implement economic policy, she explained, adding that some of the portraits on the bank’s hall of fame would be coming down — “beginning with Milton Friedman’s.”

Read the complete article here.

Banking on Montana

Marshall Swearingen • http://www.bozeman-magpie.com • July 8, 2012

DURING THE 2011 MONTANA legislature—perhaps the most bitterly partisan in recent state history—something curious happened. Rep. Joe Read, a Tea Party-backed Republican who was briefly famous on the Colbert Report for his House Bill 549 declaring global warming “beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana,” sponsored the lesser-known HB 643. The bill would authorize a state-run bank like the Bank of North Dakota.

What is curious—besides that a Tea Party Republican would support a “state-run” anything—is that a Democrat, Rep. Sue Malek of Missoula, sponsored a similar resolution. Rep. Read spoke wholeheartedly in its favor. The support, and opposition, for both bills was bipartisan.

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From the Guardian: Private banks have failed – we need a public solution

Seumas Milne • http://www.guardian.co.uk • July 3, 2012

The Barclays scandal has underlined the City’s unmuzzled power. But it also offers a chance to take democratic control.

…The rate-rigging scandal now offers a second opportunity to build the pressure for fundamental change. That’s hard to imagine being carried out by a coalition dominated by the City-funded Tories, but Labour has also yet to break fully with its pre-crisis economic model.

Tougher regulation or even a full separation of retail from investment banking will not be enough to shift the City into productive investment, or even prevent the kind of corrupt collusion that has now been exposed between Barclays and other banks. As a report by Manchester University’s Cresc research team argues this week, the size and complexity of the modern banking system makes it “near ungovernable”.

Only if the largest banks are broken up, the part-nationalised outfits turned into genuine public investment banks, and new socially owned and regional banks encouraged can finance be made to work for society, rather than the other way round. Private sector banking has spectacularly failed – and we need a democratic public solution.

Read the complete article here.