My fab daughter Alex has just won a Leverhulme Prize. Her forensic analyses of illicit markets, freeports and special economic zones are on the cutting edge of a criminology coming of age to produce the most revealing insights into the global economy. northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/n…

Speaking of criminology producing revealing insights into the global economy, here's the excellent @Thomas_Raymen with a forensic analysis of the EU and 'systemic greenwashing'. Corporations capture 27 states at once - nice move, neoliberals! Open access. journals.sagepub.com/doi/epu…

Looks like the French youth have had enough of the global moneylenders and their 'money-market discipline'. Let's hope these protests don't hit a political brick wall, but even if they do we must maintain momentum by continuing to inform young people. We don't need the global creditor class's money and we don't need to give them more free money as interest to enrich them further and enable them to subjugate us even more. Direct public investment in the infrastructure, utilities, goods and services we need does not have to be repaid and creates valuable public assets, jobs and the effective demand (needs + purchasing power) small/medium businesses need. This is the only way to reboot the struggling locales of permanent recession created by neoliberalism. If private moneylenders want to invest in riskier private businesses, let them offer their terms, but WE dictate the primary investment targets. Corrupt politicians and officials? I'm against capital punishment, but VERY long sentences. And we criminalise private funding of political campaigns. We can do this if we spread the word and maintain momentum across Europe. Discredit mendacious legacy media and fill social media with truths about money creation and investment. Lobby to change the educational curricula that govern economics and social science. If we can do this we can throw a 4400 year old giant bloodsucking leech off our backs. Epochal in the true sense of the word.

"...the bond market stops giving it the benefit of the doubt." What does this mean? Global wealth funds looking to indebt, asset-strip and buy everything in sight to rent out won't 'invest' in the goods and services France really needs because they won't get enough free money back as 'interest'. So when France issues euros to pay for what it needs, the moneylenders start panicking about being crowded out, private agencies start downgrading the nation's credit status, traders helped by supine central bankers start manipulating money markets to demand more free money and trigger an inflationary spike, and bought-off politicians and mass media whip up a mass panic to discredit the government. Let's call this what it is - a locked-in system of global usury, the extortionate private moneylending once condemned by all the major religions. Only the wealthy and their grubby little technicians will prosper in such a system. It's like the world run by Wonga International. The revolution we need is actually a 4,400 year restoration - to restore the issue of currency as a public utility for investment in social needs and targeted, sustainable economic growth. Not necessarily what will give private moneylenders safe havens and the most free money in the shortest time. But this time we clamp down harder on those who seek to corrupt the system for personal gain. Can't wait to kick the bastards in their opportunity costs so hard they'll never recover.

Catastrophe bonds. Extreme weather events and natural disasters more frequent, insurers getting hammered with payouts. Insurance companies offering cover, crazy interest rates and big profits if hurricanes/wildfires don’t occur. New hedge funds specialising in these bonds. Absolute insanity. investopedia.com/terms/c/cat…

Important. Why taxing largely unproductive billionaires doesn't deter investment in productive industry and services. High-tax France, with its world-class, state-supported infrastructure and R&D culture, is Europe's #1 direct investment target.

Out now - "...an analysis and evaluation of the only substantive criminological deployment of Lacan’s philosophy to date, in the ultra-realist framework developed by Steve Hall, Simon Winlow and Thomas Raymen." routledge.com/Lacan-for-Crim…

After a huge amount of multidisciplinary reading, I'm about to embark on my 12th book. It's an attempt to tie together economic history, anthropology, politics, sociology and neuropsychology to explain the development of 'money-power' from the Bronze Age, the control of the issue of money as credit. @winlow_s and I want to follow the trail of Hudson and Graeber but dig deeper into the 'emotional credibility' that fuelled and justified the development of systems of transferable credit - systems which over time abstracted and monetised a diversity of real values and functions. A principled outcome of the social battle over the issue of money as credit for specific down-to-earth purposes is essential to our survival. Dead easy, eh? For the first time, I'm not sure we can complete the task we've given ourselves - and as first author it's really daunting for me - but we'll try. Wish us luck!

The usual stupid comments under Chris's post. UK, Japan, US, Denmark have suspended bond sales, and many countries have proceeded with sales at negative interest rates - Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, Italy, Ireland, Spain and Portugal. We need a fuller understanding of bond markets, which are far more fragile than we have been led to believe. Money-market power relies on supine politicians and central bankers doing the bidding of traders in secondary bond and FX markets. In C18 UK bondholders entered government to establish our dependency on secondary bond markets. Of course fiat currency was used in emergencies, such as the Napoleonic Wars, but that was kept quiet. Bond markets were rolled out across Europe in the C19 and globally after 1980 by a powerful politician/banker/investor alliance whose adherents firmly believe that money markets should discipline and control governments, and of course also gift them safe savings and free money in the form of yields. A triple win for rich individuals and corporations, a triple loss for us. History's most gargantuan financial scam. Technical disempowerment would be quite simple - firm policies in the primary sales, central bank intervention, and fixed-rate, non-tradable bonds and capital controls to throttle the secondary market - but this would require coordinated policies initially across the G10. We simply lack the politicians willing and able to do this.

More cutting-edge criminology for C21 from @URealists. @Thomas_Raymen shows us that the green investment industry is inherently fraudulent and helped by neoliberal politics to operate beyond legal regulatory frameworks. Open access. link.springer.com/article/10… @BritSocCrim