“Gottfried Feder (27 January 1883 – 24 September 1941) was an economist and one of the early key members of the Nazi Party. He was their economic theoretician. Initially, it was his lecture in 1919 that drew Hitler into the party.”

“Adolf Hitler met him in summer 1919, and Feder became his mentor in finance and economics. He was the inspirer of Hitler’s opposition to “Jewish finance capitalism.”

I guess that tells me about all I need to know.

If a country can’t borrow, then the amount the public sector can spend is strictly limited by tax revenue, and that would make it impossible to rescue itself from recession, since the public sector would be extracting as much from the private sector as it spends.

And no matter how “virtuous” that might seem, in practical terms we saw the consequences in the Thirties.

The other problem with banning borrowing by sovereigns is that lenders don’t buy sovereign debt for patriotic or sentimental reasons, but because financial institutions – pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, etc – have specific future liabilities to meet, and therefore have to have predictable future income from default-free instruments.

In a normal country with its own sovereign fiat currency – think the US, UK, Japan – sovereign debt is that default-free instrument. Since such a country controls the supply of its own currency, it cannot be made to default. In financial language, it has no solvency limit.

In a country that borrows in a foreign currency, or in a common currency like the euro, sovereign debt is no longer default free, since such a country cannot create the currency it needs to pay its debt.

So the Bond Markets are not being perverse or tyrannical at all. They are simply recognizing that the euro-area is a very strange beast in which what would in a normal country be default-free no longer is. Hence the risk premium that they – quite correctly – impose on the euro periphery from time to time.

Please remember that the first duty of a pension fund is to its pensioners, not to the ego of the guys in Brussels.

Countries have to be able to borrow money just like most of the rest of us have to – whether it’s the mortgage on our home, car or student loan. It’s the way the world works.

It is not necessary for the Right to reinvent the financial wheel. There is a large corpus of material that was formulated decades ago by keen minds on the subject, and because the financial system has not changed, the relevance of these ideas remains. Those such as Silvio Gesell, Ezra Pound, Charles Coughlin, C. H. Douglas, John A. Lee, and Gottfried Feder, should again become required reading and subjects of discussion. Instead, where there is discussion on finance among the Right it often involves some idiot scheme about a silver or a gold standard. The major cause of World War II was fear of Germany’s new banking system, and also the barter trading system that was allowing Germany to displace the USA, Britain, and others in world trade.

As Feder states throughout his manifesto, currency (or credit) is simply intended as a means of exchange, not as a profit-making commodity via usury. During the Medieval era usurers were executed; now they are regarded as the epitome of respectable business practice.

Finally, the ideals of liberating all of mankind from the slavery of usury is one that can capture the imagination of multitudes of people of goodwill, as it once did during the 1920s and 1930s. It is an alternative that leaves Marxism for dead and demands the utmost idealism, based on the closing words by Feder: “Give me your hands, workers of all lands, unite!” (Manifesto, p. 57).

Feder: “Closing of the nation externally with all freedom and diversity internally. This is the correct idea of a German state.”

I think Grillo have read it

It is a matter of supreme indifference to me what financial markets and bankers think of election results. Countries can simply stop borrowing money (indeed, they never should be allowed to borrow any in the first place) and then what for these ‘financial markets’? No more profits at the expense of people.

But what to do with these bankers that we shall then no longer need?

I reckon mr Robespierre will be asked to get on stage sooner than we all think.