land bank

77 results back to index


The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

Alan Greenspan, book value, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Corn Laws, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, estate planning, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, ghettoisation, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, late capitalism, market clearing, Martin Wolf, New Journalism, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Right to Buy, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, wealth creators

Land in their ‘strategic’ banks differs in two respects: first, it typically does not have planning permission, though, as Matt Griffith writes, it ‘may become developable through the planning system in the medium to long term’; and second, it is usually, but not always, held under option rather than being owned outright (see Chapter 3).1 An influential 2008 report by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) estimated that over 80 per cent of land controlled by Britain’s major housebuilders sat in their strategic, rather than current, land banks.2 These banks are considerably more opaque than builders’ current banks. For one thing, their size is disclosed far less regularly. For another, these disclosures are much less reliable – not all options, for instance, are recorded in strategic land banks.3 As a result, in attempting to track changes in the size of builders’ land banks over time, we need to focus on their current banks, where the data are more readily available and probably more meaningful.4 These data show a dramatic increase in land-banking in recent years. The most common way of quantifying the size of a land bank is in terms of the number of years of housing supply or production at prevailing build-out rates – that is, the number of plots in the bank, divided by the number of plots completed in the previous twelve months.

Back in 2006, research by the Royal Town Planning Institute showed an average of 2.8 years land supply with implementable planning consent.1 The following year, the House Builders Federation collected data from twenty-one of the top UK housebuilding companies, finding that the average number of years of supply in the builders’ current banks was actually slightly lower – 2.5 years.2 And the year after that, sixteen of Britain’s top twenty-five housebuilders provided information about their land banks to the OFT, which estimated that, for these builders, the average current land bank contained a little over three years’ worth of supply.3 The OFT was relatively circumspect about the prevailing direction of travel in the magnitude of these banks – it merely noted ‘some evidence that landbanks have been increasing in recent years’ – but it is clear how things have progressed since then.4 In 2014, Sir Michael Lyons reported in his Housing Review that Britain’s major housebuilders were ‘currently sitting at around 4 to 5 years of supply at recent completion rates’.5 And more recently, in December 2016, the housing charity Shelter reported on the state of play in land banking at Britain’s ten biggest builders. Their short-term banks ranged in size from four to ten years’ worth of supply, averaging out at six years.6 Current land banks had more than doubled in size, in other words, since 2006–2007 – those years coinciding, of course, with a concerted effort by the government to release public land for home-building with planning permission in place. Why land privatization has coincided with mushrooming private-sector land banks, patently contributing to this growth if not exclusively causing it, is hard to say. Land banking is a complex affair, belying crude and simplistic generalizations.

In several cases, no building occurred before the resale; on other sites, no development at all has occurred years after the original sales’.3 The key point for our purposes is that land banks are the essential grist of this profitable non-construction activity. When the Cameron government embarked on the first phase of its public land-for-housing programme in 2011, it was perhaps understandable that speculative land-banking was not considered a concern, and thus that actual commitments to building houses were not made a condition of sale. Both the Callcutt and OFT reports had come to relatively benign conclusions about land-banking: it was a necessary part of the housebuilding business, and not, at that point, a cause for concern.


pages: 505 words: 133,661

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back by Guy Shrubsole

Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, congestion charging, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital map, do-ocracy, Downton Abbey, false flag, financial deregulation, fixed income, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Global Witness, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, housing crisis, housing justice, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, linked data, loadsamoney, Londongrad, machine readable, mega-rich, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, sceptred isle, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, web of trust, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Other similar schemes, however, escaped censure for some time afterwards: see Nick Duxbury, ‘Unregulated land banking firms escape FSA ruling’, Property Week, 24 April 2009, https://www.propertyweek­.com/news/unregulated­-land­-banking­-firms­-escape-fsa-ruling-/3139070.article strategic land portfolio ‘Strategic Land’, http://www.legalandgeneralcapital.com­/our-investments/list­-of­-investments­/strategic­-land.html Nearly all of it Land Registry Corporate & Commercial data extracts for Legal & General companies. My full investigation into the location of Legal & General’s land bank is online at https://whoownsengland.org­/2018/02/04­/how­-pension­-funds­-are-land-banking-in-the-green-belt/ submitting proposals Savills, ‘Luton Strategic Employment Gateway: Proposals by Legal & General’, August 2012, http://www.slipend.co­.uk/home/sites­/default­/files­/LGLuton­-Employment%20Gateway_FINAL_07%2008%2012_lr.pdf a small but crucial ‘Ransom strips in the UK’, 1 September 2015, http://www.rics.org­/uk/knowledge/glossary­/ransom­-strips­/ there will sometimes Neil O’Brien MP, ‘Green, pleasant and affordable: Why we need a new approach to supply and demand to solve Britain’s housing problem’, June 2018, http://www.ukonward.com­/wp-content/uploads­/2018­/06­/220618­-Green-Pleasant.

Examining corporate control of land is also crucial to understanding the housing crisis. One particularly controversial aspect of the housing debate that has generated much heat, and little light, in recent years is the debacle over land banking. In common parlance, land banking is the practice of hoarding land and holding it back from development until its price increases. The American economist Henry George excoriated land banking as a blight on society. One of his followers famously bought a derelict plot of land in the middle of a city and, in a canny piece of political theatre, erected a billboard on which was written: ‘Everybody works but the vacant lot.

Land Registry INSPIRE maps still bear the scars – the tell-tale shapes of land cut up into neat square plots, laid out with imaginary roads to give a sense of verisimilitude to the fictitious housebuilding plans. Other similar land banking schemes, mostly based offshore, were eventually investigated and wound down by the UK Financial Services Authority, and the practice seemed to dry up. Appalling as these land banking scams were, they were clearly of a very different nature to the practices Sajid Javid was accusing law-abiding housing developers of. But other, wholly legal forms of land banking take place all the time. One such form is practised by UK pension funds and insurance companies, who buy up land as a long-term strategic investment.


pages: 695 words: 194,693

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann

Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, delayed gratification, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, index fund, invention of the steam engine, invention of writing, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, wage slave

See Templars knowledge: finance and development of, 10–11; transmitted on the Silk Road, 176 knowledge capital, and stock prices in 1920s, 483 Köll, Elisabeth, 188–89, 433–34 Kraakman, Reinier, 121–22, 126 Kumar, Alok, 487–88 Kuxen, 303 labor theory of value, 407–8; transfer of value to the future and, 412–13; young Soviet government and, 451 Lagash, 16, 35, 37, 403, 454 laissez-faire economics: in Ayn Rand’s philosophy, 452; legalist philosophy and, 170 land, and feudal rights, 219–20. See also feudal rights land banks: colonial American, 386–88, 390, 400; Law on, 351–54, 386; Reign of Terror and, 390–92 land speculation: of Dutch in American West, 393–95; in new capital of Washington, DC, 383, 396, 399; westward expansion of America and, 396–98, 399 Laurion silver mines, 87–90 Law, John: Banque Générale opened by, 354–55; Banque Royale of, 355, 356, 358–59, 360–62, 378; early life of, 347, 349; Essay on a Land Bank, 351–53; French government debt and, 355–56, 357; as gambler, 347, 349, 351, 377; land banks and, 351–54, 386; mathematical knowledge of, 349, 351, 379; Mississippi Bubble and, 347, 357–58, 361–62; Mississippi Company and, 12, 355–59; Money and Trade, 353–54, 361; portrait of, 348; as richest person in Europe, 347; satirized in Great Mirror of Folly, 376, 378–79; in Venice, 349–51 law of large numbers, 261–62, 264; Dutch investment fund and, 385; insurance and, 365; life annuities and, 269; option pricing and, 287 lead pollution, from Iberian mines, 133–34 Le Bris, David, 298–99 Lefèvre, Henri, 276, 279–82, 283 Legalism, Chinese, 170–71 legal systems: Athenian, 80–81; Babylonian, 19, 46, 48, 70; European, to adjudicate feudal rights, 220; Roman, 126–27, 234–35; of Toulouse, 294 Le Goff, Jacques, 233–34 Leibnitz, Gottfried, 261–63, 271 Lenin, Vladimir, 446–49, 452, 456, 491 Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci), 238–46, 247–48 Lévy, Paul, 283, 286 Lévy processes, 286 Lex Claudia, 106 Liber Abaci (Fibonacci), 238–46, 247–48 libertarianism, 452 Lieberman, Stephen, 27 life annuities, 254–55; Condorcet’s optimistic proposal for, 273–74, 275; de Moivre on, 265–66; De Witt’s tract on, 256–57, 262; for Fibonacci from Pisa, 245; French, 266–69, 273, 362, 517; Malthus on, 274–75; pooled, 382; problem of pricing, 262, 263–64, 265–66, 272; risks associated with, 258; in seventeenth-century Netherlands, 255–57, 322; Social Security as, 495, 498, 499, 502; sold by Templars, 212; tontines, 259, 266–69, 273 life expectancy: annuities and, 262, 263; global changes in, 7, 517 Ligato Pecuniae, 230–31, 232 Li Hongzhang, 430, 431, 432, 439 limited liability: Bubble Act and, 343; Chinese company with, 433–34; of Honor del Bazacle shares, 297; Muscovy Company lacking in, 310; of Roman mining operations, 128; Roman slaves and, 119–22; of shareholders of a corporation, 300; VOC (Dutch East India Company) moving to, 318.

DEAD TREASURE Sometime in the early 1990s, Antoin Murphy found himself looking at a manuscript of a hitherto unknown economic treatise titled Essay on a Land Bank. Although its provenance was unknown, it came up in the antiquarian book trade and was shown to Murphy due to his reputation as a top economic historian. He identified it as Law’s earliest known work as an economist. It was an extraordinary document that showed the first step in Law’s intellectual evolution. In the essay, Law proposed the creation of a bank in England backed by land rather than specie. The reason? Silver fluctuated in value due to variation in supply. The supply of land was fixed, and this made it a better form of money. Land banks had been proposed before, and indeed, Parliament had authorized the incorporation of a National Land Bank in 1696, whereby money would be raised from shareholders to extend mortgages to landowners.

It comes many times unsought for, and often goes away without reason, and when once lost, is hardly to be recovered.8 The National Land Bank failed to attract sufficient subscribers. Moneyed Whigs saw it as an attack on the primary position of the Bank of England, which they controlled. Plus, the terms of the subscription rights were evidently not economically attractive. The financial project to redefine wealth in terms of property did not fly. Despite this earlier failed attempt at a land bank by others, John Law took the concept a bold step further. Rather than write mortgages, why not have a bank that actually held land?


pages: 346 words: 90,371

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, Laurie Macfarlane

agricultural Revolution, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, deindustrialization, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, full employment, garden city movement, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, place-making, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, working poor, working-age population

The examples of Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea show how planning gain and the spillover effects of income and population growth on land values can be partly socialised to benefit the nation, rather than a relatively concentrated class of landowners. In Germany, for example, the planning law freezes the value of the land when the local municipality decides to specify an area for residential construction.1 The uplift in land values then finances infrastructure. A national public land bank, as in Korea, or public or community-owned land banks able to acquire land at existing use values can achieve the same objective. In many respects the UK’s New Town building programme from 1946 to 1970 was also able to do this. Though addressing the UK’s pressing problems is important, the book also examines the neglect of land in economic theory more generally.

This has helped ensure that land and housing have remained affordable in South Korea – between 1995 and 2013 the ratio of house prices to income declined from a base of 100 at the beginning of 1995 to 62.3 at the end of 2013, while the UK’s shot up from 100 to 167.7 (Muellbauer, 2014b). In the UK, similar benefits could be achieved by establishing a national Land Bank, responsible for purchasing, developing and selling land for residential and commercial use, acquiring idle and vacant land for resale, and developing new towns. A ‘Land Bank of Britain’ could use public money to buy land without planning permission and then lease or sell land to private developers at development prices following the grant of planning permission. As well as being a source of land release for housing and other development, the increase in land values could provide significant sources of revenue for the government, as in South Korea and Singapore.

Act (1919) (the Addison Act), 78 housing quality, 97 housing supply, effect of residual valuation methodology, 98 housing tenure: European regulations, 32; housing costs by tenure, 179; leasehold-freehold, 213; reform proposals, 212–15; restricted sale tenures, 213–14; reversionary tenures, 214; trends, 82, 83, 106–7, 107; see also private rented sector housing wealth: age distribution, 181–2, 181; consumption-to-income ratio trends, 143–4, 144; increase, 158–9, 170; and increase in wealth-to-income ratio, 172–3; net property wealth distribution, 174–5, 174, 175, 176; and wealth inequality, 174–9 Howard, Sir Ebenezer, 75–6 human rights, 23 imputed rental income: Switzerland, 157; UK tax-exemption, 85, 104–5 income: consumption-to-income ratio trends, 143–4, 144; disposable income to house price ratio, 112–14, 114; effects of increased income, 9, 64 income inequality, 162–3 income tax, 69, 168–9 Industrial Revolution, 68–9 inequality: causes and consequences, 165–9; and excessive economic rent, 43; and financial instability, 185–7; Gini coefficient measures, 163, 177, 178; health and social problems, 185; and homeownership, 92; and house prices, 177–8; and housing costs, 179–80; income inequality, 162–3; and inheritance, 182; and land value, 46, 173, 190; and landownership, 26–7; and mortgage debt, 116; property and the state, 17–18; regional inequality, 165, 182–3; and taxation, 168–9; wealth inequality, 163–4, 174–9 infrastructure projects: compulsory land purchase, 31, 73, 196–7, 222; and land value, 6, 42, 194–5 inheritance, 19, 127, 182 inheritance tax (IHT), 104–5, 169, 202 Institute of New Economic Thinking, 218n11 iron and steel industry, 69 James II, King, 66, 80 Japan: credit window guidance, 207; credit-driven bubbles, 111; financial crash, 151–3; house price to income ratio, 112, 114; land prices, 32; mortgage market structure, 157; size of new-builds, 97 Jefferson, Thomas, 22, 26 Jubilee Line, 194–5 Keynes, John Maynard, 84 Keynesianism, 83, 84, 152 King, Mervyn, 154 Korean Land Corporation, 196 labour markets, and homeownership, 27–8 labour productivity, 165–7 land: changing economic role, 190; as collateral, 7, 20–1, 55, 127–8, 160; conflated with capital, 48–52; definition, 38; differences between land and capital, 52–7; and economic rent, 39–44, 56–7; factor of production, 37–8; financialisation, 14, 110–12; historical uses, 3–4; immobile and fixed nature, 55; limited supply, 4, 63; permanent and timeless space, 52–4; state acquisition, 30–1 Land Bank of Britain proposal, 196 land development taxes, 35 land pooling, 197–8 land prices: agricultural, 122–3; effect of financial crisis, 101; land banks (current and strategic), 96–7, 101; and planning regulations, 32; volatility, 8, 8; see also land value Land Registry, 63 land rights, US native population, 26 land taxes: and economic rent, 34–5, 45–8, 76–7, 199, 222; opposition, 57–8, 60, 77; political barriers, 35; theoretical advantages, 34–5; see also land value tax (LVT) land title, 21, 31, 36 land value: asset for the future, 6–7; determined by current use, 6; effect on capital of rising costs, 56; factors outside owner’s control, 55–6; increase over time, 53–4; and inequality, 46, 173, 190; lack of reliable public dataset, 63–4, 219; location and infrastructure, 6; residual valuation methodology, 98–9; site value vs market value, 202; state interventions, 30; uplift created by planning permission, 79–80, 216; use value vs market value, 110; see also land prices land value tax (LVT): Australia, 204–5; Denmark, 204; economic case for reform, 199–201; Henry George’s single tax movement, 46–8, 57–8; Mirlees Review recommendation, 199–200; People’s Budget proposal (1909), 48n9, 76–7; practical and political challenges, 201–5; split rate taxation, 204–5 land-credit feedback cycle, 8, 114–19, 190–1, 222 landlords: taxation, 85; see also buy-to-let (BTL); private rented sector ‘The Landlord’s Game’, 47 landownership: benefits of public ownership, 193–6; and economic rent, 10–13; ‘high income-elasticity of demand’, 9; and inequality, 26–7; land pooling, 197–8; modern economic theories, 16–18; moral qualities, 22; multiple forms, 18–20; and political power, 22–3; and social status, 20; as theft, 22–5, 43, 189; see also property ownership Lassalle, Ferdinand, 43 leasehold-freehold tenure, 213 leases, lifetime leases, 74 legacy landowners, 197–8 Lenin, Vladimir, 43 Letchworth Garden City, 75 Letchworth Heritage Foundation, 75 leverage, 184 liberal economics see classical economics lifecycle model, 124–8, 159 living conditions, 70–1 Lloyd George, David, 48, 76, 78 Lloyds TSB, 139 loan-to-value (LTV) ratios, 139, 156, 157 location, 6, 40–3 Locke, John, 16–18, 26 London: Bishops’ Avenue, 109; Boundary Estate, 73; Jubilee Line, 194–5; Old Nichol, 73; private rented sector, 223; St Clements Community Land Trust, 214 mainstream economics see neoclassical economics Malthus, Thomas, 40 manufacturing industry, 168 marginal productivity theory, 49–50, 51, 56, 57–9, 165–7 Marshall, Alfred, 55 Marx, Karl, 18, 43, 59, 61 mercantilism, 38, 70 microeconomics, 34, 51, 53 Mill, John Stuart, 25, 45, 199 Milton Keynes, 88 Minsky, Hyman, 152–3, 155 MIRAS (mortgage interest relief at source), 86 Mirrlees Review, 199–200 monetarism, 86, 87 Monopoly, 47 mortgage lending: affordability pressures, 100; bad debt, 140; bank funding arrangements, 131; as credit creation, 114; debt-to-income ratio, 115–16, 116, 139, 159, 186; default rates, 141; deregulation, 88, 132–5, 178; financial crisis collapse, 139–40; full recourse vs non-recourse loans, 141–2; house price-credit feedback cycle, 119–24; importance in banks’ lending portfolios, 61, 119; interest rates for landlords, 77; lifecycle model, 124–8, 159; loan-to-income limits, 155; loan-to-value (LTV) ratios, 139, 156, 157; mortgage debt-to-GDP ratio, 156–8, 156; mortgage interest relief at source (MIRAS), 86; reform proposals, 211–12; residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), 137–9, 140, 160; tax relief, 133; trends, 107; see also buy-to-let (BTL) Muellbauer, John, 110 mutual co-ownership, 86 Napoleonic Wars, 69 national accounts, lack of land value information, 63–4, 219 national income: wealth to national income ratio, 171–4, 171, 172; see also GDP nationalisation, 43 natural law, 25–6 natural property rights theory, 16–18 negative equity, 123, 133–4 neoclassical economics, 5, 17, 27, 48–9, 50, 52, 57, 111, 192 Netherlands, land pooling, 198 New Keynesianism, 125n6 New Towns programme, 66, 71, 80–1, 88, 184, 197 new-build homes, 97 NIMBYism, 24 Northern Rock, 136–7 Nozick, Robert, 26 OECD, 64, 219, 220 Office for National Statistics, Blue Book, 219 oil sector, 44 OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), 44 orthodox economics see neoclassical economics Oswald, Andrew J., 27 overseas investment, 100, 122, 149, 160, 183 Owen, Robert, 71 Paine, Thomas, 25 Pareto efficiency, 166n1 patents, 44 Peabody, George, 71 Peel, Robert, 43 Pennsylvania, split rate taxation, 205 Phillips, Elizabeth J.


pages: 169 words: 52,744

Big Capital: Who Is London For? by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land bank, land value tax, market design, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-truth, quantitative easing, rent control, rent gap, Right to Buy, Russell Brand, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, working poor

Since Gordon Brown failed to heed Kate Barker’s warning of how housebuilders trickle out homes, no governing party has challenged the monopoly the top housebuilders have over the industry. When he was Leader of the Opposition in 2014, Ed Miliband identified similar issues and criticized developers for ‘land banking’, the process whereby housebuilders buy up land and fail to build on it as they wait for it to rise in value. An investigation by the Guardian found that Britain’s biggest housebuilders are sitting on enough land with planning permission to create more than 600,000 new homes. Berkeley, Barratt, Persimmon and Taylor Wimpey, the four biggest companies in the industry, own more than three quarters of the plots, and give over £1.5 billion to shareholders.17 Miliband threatened that under a Labour government, developers would have to ‘use it or lose it’, declaring that ‘we’ve got to break the power of the big developers because they’re sitting on hundreds of thousands of places for homes with planning permission and not building because they’re waiting for it to accumulate in value.’18 In 2016, Secretary of State for Communities Sajid Javid echoed these concerns in a keynote speech to housebuilders, telling them that: ‘I cannot look the other way when I see land banking holding up development.

Berkeley, Barratt, Persimmon and Taylor Wimpey, the four biggest companies in the industry, own more than three quarters of the plots, and give over £1.5 billion to shareholders.17 Miliband threatened that under a Labour government, developers would have to ‘use it or lose it’, declaring that ‘we’ve got to break the power of the big developers because they’re sitting on hundreds of thousands of places for homes with planning permission and not building because they’re waiting for it to accumulate in value.’18 In 2016, Secretary of State for Communities Sajid Javid echoed these concerns in a keynote speech to housebuilders, telling them that: ‘I cannot look the other way when I see land banking holding up development. Some of you have conceded to me, in private, that it happens. Some of you still deny it’s an issue. But there’s clearly something going on. The number of plots approved for residential development each year rose by 59 per cent between 2011 and 2015. But the number of building starts rose by just 29 per cent.’19 But despite these threats very little has happened to stop the practice, and the stranglehold of the developers continues.

But the number of building starts rose by just 29 per cent.’19 But despite these threats very little has happened to stop the practice, and the stranglehold of the developers continues. When the government published its Housing White Paper in 2017 it proposed the maximum amount of time developers are allowed to land bank be reduced from three years to two, but with caveats, leading to criticisms that this will be difficult to implement. Instead, in urging the removal of planning restrictions, the Conservatives appear to be hoping for a return to the 1930s, before we had a functioning planning system and the private sector produced the classic 1930s semi-detached houses which define London’s sprawling metroland suburbs – and which gave impetus to calls for a greenbelt.


pages: 1,042 words: 266,547

Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham, David Dodd

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, backtesting, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, full employment, Greenspan put, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Michael Milken, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, prudent man rule, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, secular stagnation, shareholder value, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, two and twenty, zero-coupon bond

The price record shows that the Kansas City Terminal Railway Company 4s frequently sold at no higher prices than representative issues of individual guarantor companies which later turned out to be of questionable soundness, whereas at no time was the safety of the Terminal bond ever a matter of doubt.12 It would seem good policy for investors, therefore, to favor bonds of this type, which carry the guaranty of a number of substantial enterprises, in preference to the obligations of a single company. Federal Land Bank Bonds. A somewhat different aspect of the joint and several guarantee appears in the important case of the Federal Land Bank bonds, which are secured by deposit of farm mortgages. The obligations of each of the 12 separate banks are guaranteed by the 11 others, so that each Federal Land Bank bond is in reality a liability of the entire system. When these banks were organized, there was created concurrently a group of Joint Stock Land Banks which also issued bonds, but the obligations of one Joint Stock Bank were not guaranteed by the others.13 Both sets of land banks were under United States government supervision and the bonds of both were made exempt from federal taxation.

When these banks were organized, there was created concurrently a group of Joint Stock Land Banks which also issued bonds, but the obligations of one Joint Stock Bank were not guaranteed by the others.13 Both sets of land banks were under United States government supervision and the bonds of both were made exempt from federal taxation. Practically all of the stock of the Federal Land Banks was subscribed for originally by the United States government (which, however, did not assume liability for their bonds); the Joint Stock Land Bank shares were privately owned. At the inception of this dual system, investors were disposed to consider the federal supervision and tax exemption as a virtual guarantee of the safety of the Joint Stock Land Bank bonds, and they were therefore willing to buy them at a yield only ½% higher than that returned by the Federal Land Bank bonds. In comparing the nonguaranteed Joint Stock bonds with the mutually guaranteed federal bonds, the following observations might well have been made: 1.

For a comprehensive account and criticism of these banks, see Carl H. Schwartz, “Financial Study of the Joint Stock Land Banks,” Washington, D. C., 1938. 14 A number of the Joint Stock bond issues defaulted during 1930–1932, a large proportion sold at receivership prices, and all of them declined to a speculative price level. On the other hand, not only were there no defaults among the Federal Land Bank bonds, but their prices suffered a relatively moderate shrinkage, remaining consistently on an investment level. This much more satisfactory experience of the investor in the Federal Land Bank bonds was due in good part to the additional capital subscribed by the United States government to these Banks, and to the closer supervision to which they were subjected, but the joint and several guarantee undoubtedly proved of considerable benefit.


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

In conformity with Wicksell’s theory, the disparity between the natural and the market rates of interest accentuated credit expansion and played an important role in the sharp upswing of prices’ (‘Prices and Wages at Paris under John Law’s System’, p. 63; see also François Velde, ‘John Law’s System’, American Economic Review, 97 (2), 2007). fn10 In his ‘Essay on the Land Bank’ (written around 1704), Law criticized the rival land bank scheme of Hugh Chamberlen, who proposed supplying £10,000 of bank notes against land collateral, yielding an annual income of just £150 (i.e. a capitalization rate of 1.5 per cent), and attacked John Briscoe’s plan for a land bank which mooted an even lower lending rate. fn11 That inflationary forces initially raise prices in some parts of the economy before becoming more widespread is known as the ‘Cantillon effect’. 5: John Bull Cannot Stand Two Per Cent fn1 ‘Bad business takes time to grow – especially bad lending business, which is the most dangerous, because when discovered it saps credit, and destroys the spring of industry’ (Bagehot, Collected Works, vol.

Defoe scorned any claim that Law might have to originality; the notion that paper credit could serve as money, lessening the need for hard currency, he wrote, ‘are common topics that every stock-jobber is master of’.8 Nor was Law the first to propose a land bank; that honour belongs to a certain William Potter who came up with the idea during Cromwell’s Protectorate. Law was one of several contemporary land bank advocates writing at the close of the seventeenth century. Another influence on Law’s thinking was the Bank of England, which opened its doors in the spring of 1694 at around the date of his murder conviction. The Bank’s first issue of paper notes was backed not by gold but by a claim on the public credit, which derived from a large loan made by shareholders to the government of William of Orange.

., 109* Joplin, Thomas, 64–5 Jordan, Virgil, 184–5 JP Morgan Chase, 232† Juglar, Clément, 143, 153 junk bonds, 222–3, 305, 306–7 Justinian, Code of, 25 Kane, Edward, 145 Katsenelson, Vitaliy, 177 Kaufman, Dr Henry, 109–10 Kay, John, 121 Keynes, John Maynard: advocates price stability, 87, 94, 97; and demographics, 125, 126, 127; and economic nationalism, 261–2; euthanasia of the rentier ambition, 302, 302*; fails to foresee 1929 crash, 94–5; and Gesell’s rusting money, 243, 294; on Hayek and his fellow ‘liquidationists’, 100; on investing in stock market, 239; on liquidity risk, 226, 227; rejects ‘natural rate’ concept, xxiv–xxv, 42, 97*, 142*; views on interest, xxiv–xxv, 11, 42, 86, 97*, 125, 142, 142*, 195, 245, 311*; General Theory, 97*, 226; Treatise on Money (1931), 11, 97, 142* King, Mervyn, 105, 121, 194, 230*, 304 King, Robert, 266 Kippner, Greta, 110* KKR (buyout firm), 222 Klarman, Seth, 308, 309 Klecker, Matthew, 141 kleptocrats, 258 Kmart, 169–70 Knickerbocker Trust Company, 83–4, 84* Koby, Yann, 236 Kohn, Donald, 112–13 Koons, Jeff, Balloon Dog (Orange), 208 Kornai, János, 278 Kraft Heinz Company, 161, 169 Kravis, Henry, 222 Krugman, Paul, 113*, 142, 278 Kuroda, Haruhiko, 119, 120, 122 Kynaston, David, 232* La Vega, Joseph de, 68–9 Lagarde, Christine, 119 Lagash (Mesopotamian city), 8, 9, 200 Laínez, Father Diego, 24 Lampert, Eddie, 169–70 land: China’s ‘land bubble’ economy, 272, 273–4, 288; as collateral, 5, 7, 47; fraudulently inflated values, 80; and ‘fructification theory’, xxiii*; interest and price of, 31, 33, 34–5, 39, 42, 44, 53–4, 173, 174; land bank concept, 47, 48, 59, 59*; as productive/income producing, 15, 26, 37, 181, 265; value of in post-crisis decade, 173, 174 Larsa (Babylonian city), 7 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 188 Latvia, 253 Law, John, xxii, 30–31, 45–8; establishes General Bank (1716), 49–50; as French Finance Minister, 46, 57, 298; land bank concept, 47, 48, 59, 59*; pamphlets on nature of money, 47, 49, 55–6, 59; proposal to French Regent, 48–9 see also France; Mississippi bubble Law, William, of Lauriston, 45 Lawson, Thomas, 156 Le Goff, Jacques, 28 Lee, Aileen, 148 Lee, Jamie, 215 Leffingwell, Russell, 93–4 Lehman Brothers bankruptcy (2008), xxi, 60, 114 Leijonhufvud, Axel, 121, 247 Lenin, V.


pages: 614 words: 168,545

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

Table 7.1 Major UK corporate land rentiers by category Property companies Real estate investment trusts (REITs) Financial investors Property developers / housebuilders Infrastructure rentiers Other Canary Wharf Group • Property portfolio valued at £7.9 billion (end 2017) • Rental income £278 million (2017) Grosvenor Group • UK property portfolio valued at £3.2 billion (end 2016) • UK rental income £111m million (2016) British Land • Property portfolio valued at £10.0 billion (March 2018) • Rental income £441 million (year to March 2018) Land Securities • Property portfolio valued at £14.1 billion (March 2018) • Rental income £663 million (year to March 2018) Aviva • Property portfolio valued at £10.8 billion (end 2017), of which £6.6 billion in UK • Rental income £574m million (2017) (UK share not specified) Legal & General • Property portfolio valued at £8.3 billion (end 2017) • Rental income £467 million (2017) Persimmon (at end 2017) • 52,585 plots in short-term owned land bank + 24,482 plots in long-term owned land bank, with a combined value of £2.0 billion • 100,000+ potential plots in long-term controlled strategic pipeline Taylor Wimpey (at end 2017) • 56,619 plots in UK short-term owned land bank, valued at £2.3 billion • 26,836 plots in UK long-term owned land bank, valued at £90 million • 90,409 potential plots in UK long-term controlled strategic pipeline National Grid • Property portfolio valued at £2.3 billion (March 2018) • Property business profits £84 million (year to March 2018) Royal Mail • Property portfolio valued at £845 million (March 2018) Big Yellow Group • Property portfolio valued at £1.3 billion (March 2018) • Rental income £117 million (year to March 2018) Tesco • Property portfolio valued at £16.3 billion (February 2018) • Rental income £372 million (year to February 2018) Source: Author Before looking in a bit more detail at each category, it is worth highlighting a vital characteristic that is common to all of them: the business of these rentiers is primarily in commercial property – retail, office and industrial – and undeveloped land.

The 1980s, in short, saw NFC become a property developer. Thompson recalled: Property development was almost thrust upon us. We acquired a land bank which with the UK property boom of the 1980s has proved to be more valuable than anyone imagined. We brought in the skills, not just to sell sites – which was all that we were allowed to do when we were state owned – but to develop them. In future we would act as the property developer. We have made increasing profits out of this activity … We inherited the advantage of a first-class land bank. Thompson admitted to ‘a nagging doubt as to whether this is really our world … the nagging doubt has remained with me, though not, I hastily add, with my colleagues’.2 Given the wealth that inheritance of the land bank generated for Thompson’s colleagues, their lack of introspection is probably not so surprising.

Thompson admitted to ‘a nagging doubt as to whether this is really our world … the nagging doubt has remained with me, though not, I hastily add, with my colleagues’.2 Given the wealth that inheritance of the land bank generated for Thompson’s colleagues, their lack of introspection is probably not so surprising. NFC, whose vestiges today constitute an operating division of the international courier service company Deutsche Post, is far from the only former UK public enterprise to have generated substantial post-privatization income from land – the icing on the cake, as it were, of the core infrastructure rents explored in the previous chapter. When these enterprises were privatized, the assets transferred very often included large tracts of land along with network infrastructures, workforces, customer contracts, and so forth.


pages: 288 words: 83,690

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, do well by doing good, drive until you qualify, East Village, Edward Glaeser, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land bank, late capitalism, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, private military company, profit motive, public intellectual, Quicken Loans, RAND corporation, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The current method of dealing with these properties in New Orleans and Detroit is to sell them off to the highest bidder instead of figuring out a more productive public or semi-public use for them. Land banking would not have to mean never selling the land, but it could mean adding conditions to development—for example, requiring developers to build a certain percentage of affordable housing before land is sold. And with a good land-banking program, a local government could open up the decision-making process to residents, requiring public input before a piece of land is sold off or developed. This is already happening on a small scale: all four cities in this book have small nonprofits working to collectively buy land and keep it affordable.

Expand, protect, and make accessible public lands. In New York, 30 percent of all land is public (mostly streets and sidewalks). Half of the other 70 percent is taken up by private development, the other half by city infrastructure, institutions, and public space. The little land that’s left should be land-banked—that is, taken off the market—by the city. In the 1980s, after the city’s economic collapse, the city owned nearly half of the buildings in Harlem. What would have happened if, instead of selling those buildings off to private developers at bargain-basement prices, which is what the city did, it instead preserved those buildings as city property and turned them into affordable housing and community space?

The share of tech workers living in the Bay Area: Ashley Rodriguez, “Tech Workers Are Increasingly Looking to Leave Silicon Valley,” Quartz, February 29, 2016. Index absentee homeownership, 169–170 Adams, Eric, 208 affordable housing, 29, 144. See also public housing demolition of, 52 lack of government support for, 21, 134, 169, 179 land banking and, 211 in New Orleans, 29 in New York City, 145, 169, 173, 179–180, 190, 199–200, 203–204, 212 racial segregation and, 110 in San Francisco, 131–134=135 SROs as, 135 Airbnb, 61–62, 134, 136, 211 Angotti, Tom, 210 Aristil, Tim, 129 Atlantic Yards (Brooklyn), 174, 202 Back to the City Conference, 32 Baker, Richard, 53 Baldwin, James, 168 ballot initiatives, 211 Beame, Abraham, 191–192 Berlin, 142–143, 184, 214 Berni, Ryan, 43 Bigard, Ashana, 19–23, 26–30, 64 Bing, Dave, 83 Black Lives Matter movement, 214 Blanco, Kathleen, 18, 26, 48–49, 50 de Blasio, Bill, 144, 170, 175, 187–188, 202–203 gentrification and, 201 zoning laws and, 190 Bloomberg, Michael, 41, 169–170, 179, 201–204 Bolaños, Annabelle, 131, 144, 148 Boston, MA, 107 Boyd, Alicia, 198–200, 207, 210 Brash, Julian, 215 Bratton, Bill, 175 Brinkley, Kenny, 103–104 Broder & Sachse, 74, 76 “broken windows” policing, 175 Brooklyn, NY, 8, 176–180, 197–198, 217.


pages: 495 words: 136,714

Money for Nothing by Thomas Levenson

Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, British Empire, carried interest, clockwork universe, credit crunch, do well by doing good, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, experimental subject, failed state, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, income inequality, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land bank, market bubble, Money creation, open economy, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Republic of Letters, risk/return, side project, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine

What distinguished Law from many of his contemporaries, though, was his eagerness to test out his theories in the real world. His first such attempt was a variation of a project that had already been proposed by others: a land bank—a money-creating institution that would issue banknotes supported not by deposits of precious metal but by the production of the acreage within any given jurisdiction. Such land banks had been suggested in London in the preceding decade, but Law moved past his predecessors to come up with a much more modern view of what gives money its value, in a series of intellectual steps traced by the historian Antoin E.

Law argued that because the supply and demand for money set its value, conscious decisions about the amount of money to be made available within a nation could shape economic outcomes for any government willing to create the institution—his land bank—that could play that role. Equally important, he recognized that the forms of money that could affect such outcomes were not restricted to legal tender, coins, or even the paper currency a land bank could issue. “The stocks of the East India Companies, of the Bank, Irish debentures, etc.,” he wrote, “are received in some payments because their value though uncertain what it will be yet at the time it is known and those who think these stocks will rise rather than fall and are willing to run the hazard will prefer them to the same sum in silver money”—or to a banknote.

For Law the goal was to interrogate everything within the world of trade, commerce, production—anything to do with getting and spending—that could illuminate just what money is and does. A land bank was barely the beginning of Law’s intellectual journey. It was a long way from the experiment he would ultimately attempt, his version of what would be attempted by the South Sea Company. But it set him on course for that destination. Law’s next step was to push past these initial thoughts. Money made of metal, or even, as in his early land bank proposals, backed by actual fields of dirt, was intimately connected to the material world. Once he realized that shares in trading companies could perform many of the same duties handled by money derived from such solid pieces of the material world, Law came to argue that such financial inventions formed a numerical representation of much of the economy—all the growing and manufacturing and trading and craft that could be parceled out as shares.


pages: 512 words: 131,112

Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones, June Williamson

accelerated depreciation, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, call centre, carbon footprint, Donald Shoup, edge city, gentrification, global village, index fund, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, knowledge worker, land bank, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, megaproject, megastructure, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, postindustrial economy, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

“Building C-Burbia,” another winning proposal from the 2010 Build a Better Burb ideas design competition, proposes a design policy to address climate change by retrofitting sprawl with carbon sink landscapes, opportunistically planted in highway verges, arterial medians, and subdivision sidewalks, as well as in “ecological easements” on private property. Bike lanes can be paved with permeable grass-crete to both sequester carbon and reduce stormwater runoff, as can land-banked vacant lots. Credit: Renderings by Denise Hoffman Brandt, Alexa Helsell, and Bronwyn Gropp, 2010, courtesy of the Long Island Index. Many of these benefits are manifesting in the growing suburban farming movement, as chronicled by Fritz Haeg in the book Edible Estates. Homeowners are transforming their yards into vegetable gardens and keeping hens for fresh eggs, although sometimes they need to redraft subdivision CC&Rs for permission to do so.

If you were given X billion dollars (the amount depends on the size of the city) to buy up failing commercial real estate and convert it to parkland, how would you use it to realize your long-term regional plans? Investment banker Michael Messner believes the banking system is too weak to absorb the $1.4 trillion in commercial mortgages that are coming due and is proposing that the Treasury Department establish a zero interest land bank to buy up excess underperforming commercial property (the “red fields”), convert and maintain them as parks (the “green fields”) for 10 years or until the economy recovers sufficiently to redevelop approximately 70 percent of the total land. It is a bold proposal, which, regardless of its ultimate ability to secure funding, is nonetheless succeeding at helping several cities envision transformational sustainable changes through retrofitting on a large scale.

Conversely, it is the inclusion of retail and restaurants in the mix that makes the apartments and condominiums attractive. In these cases, such as The Colony in SouthPark, outside Charlotte and Gramercy in Carmel, Indiana, the buffering garden apartment complexes, some with golf courses, have functioned as a community “land bank” of sorts. They are like low-lying fruit to developers seeking redevelopment opportunities because they are single parcel, were not generally built to high standards, and are now aging. As Christopher Jones, a director of planning and development for Beazer Homes in Atlanta, says, the purchase of below-market apartment complexes “affords us acreage we wouldn’t normally be able to acquire.”35 Accommodating New Immigrants: Brookside Apartments and Gulfton Brookside Apartments in College Park, near Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta, began life in the early 1970s as The Windjammer.


pages: 232 words: 77,956

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else by James Meek

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, call centre, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, electricity market, Etonian, Ford Model T, gentrification, HESCO bastion, housing crisis, illegal immigration, land bank, Leo Hollis, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-industrial society, pre–internet, price mechanism, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor

Britain’s established housebuilders, Griffith reckons, no longer have housebuilding as their primary function. They’ve essentially become dealers in land. Griffith estimates British housebuilders have enough land to build 1.5 million houses. This is much higher than most estimates because he includes not only land that has been given planning permission for homes to be built on it but also the shadow land bank: the vast stretches of agricultural land that housebuilders’ canny local agents guess will get planning permission in future, and have tied up through confidential option deals with landowners. Why is this land not being built on faster? Because the price the builders paid for the land is tied to the price they expect to get for the houses when they do finally build on it.

In lean times they can’t build, because to do so would be to acknowledge that they overpaid for the land, which would threaten them and the banks that lent to them with massive losses through the devaluation of their assets. Instead of competing to build the most attractive houses, the firms in the private housebuilding oligopoly compete over who can best use their land-banking skills to anticipate the next housing bubble and survive the last one. The whole system incentivises land hoarding and an undersupply of new homes compared to demand, to keep prices high. This, in turn, incentivises banks to favour property loans over other forms of lending. An incredible 76 per cent of all bank loans in Britain go to property, and 64 per cent of that to residential mortgages.

Against this is David Orr’s prescription: to increase housing supply at the other end of the market with a relatively small increase in government funding to housing associations, and to hand council housing over to a new set of European-style municipal housing agencies that could borrow money without adding to the national debt. Housing associations and councils have land banks of their own and every reason to build on them. ‘What is the thing that most characterises subsidised housing? Answer: subsidy,’ Orr says. ‘If we had a government that wanted to see a significant increase in the supply of new homes they would stop asking “Can we do it?” and they would start asking “How can we do it?”


China's Superbank by Henry Sanderson, Michael Forsythe

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Carmen Reinhart, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, failed state, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, price mechanism, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, too big to fail, urban renewal, urban sprawl, work culture

The East River and Hudson are there, too, with water bounding three sides of the planned financial center, which lies on an oxbow of the Hai River. So is Lincoln Center, which is advising the local government on setting up a new arts center in the development, called the Yujiapu Financial District. Tianjin’s history with CDB goes back to 2003, when the bank signed the biggest loan agreement in China at the time with the city’s land bank, a loan of 50 billion yuan, which was later handed over to the financing vehicle. At the beginning of spring of that year CDB vice governor Yao Zhongmin held talks with newly arrived Mayor Dai Xianglong, who had beaten out Chen for the top job at the central bank five years earlier. Yao proposed using revenue from land sales to guarantee the loans from CDB.

Before the bank turned up, Tianjin had been able to afford maintenance of its existing infrastructure only, not new building, according to a book on the case published by CDB and Renmin University.38 From 1999 to 2003, Tianjin’s average fiscal funds every year for city infrastructure were a measly 6.3 billion yuan, which was hampering its development as a port. Setting up the financing vehicle put the infrastructure funding on a “market basis.” Under CDB’s loan deal, the land bank had the rights to sell the land in the central city and would pay back the proceeds straight into its account at Tianjin’s CDB branch before being transferred to the city’s account in the same bank. CDB could thus automatically take the money it was owed and could supervise the process of funds transfer.

By 2009, it was a different story: China Index Academy estimated the city’s land sales revenue was 73.2 billion yuan, a 67 percent increase over 2008. While the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in early 2003 in Beijing intervened and prevented Chen Yuan from visiting Tianjin to sign the deal, it was eventually signed in June of that year. The original loan contract was signed with the city’s land bank; in 2004, the city set up an LGFV with four subsidiaries to handle the different projects, including two subway lines, greening of the city, and riverside infrastructure development. The income from the subway projects only needed to cover operating costs; it didn’t need to pay back the loan; the money to pay back the loan for all the projects would nearly all come from government income from selling land rights.


pages: 261 words: 103,244

Economists and the Powerful by Norbert Haring, Norbert H. Ring, Niall Douglas

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, buy and hold, central bank independence, collective bargaining, commodity trading advisor, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversified portfolio, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, illegal immigration, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, land bank, law of one price, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, old-boy network, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Solow, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, shareholder value, short selling, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

The farmers, on the other hand, were not served by the existing banks in their financial needs and were deeply in debt, mostly with tax liabilities. The land banks proposed as the main alternative to the merchant banks would benefit them the most. These public entities would issue government bills of debt secured by land. Bill holders could use them to pay taxes. As producers and debtors, farmers would benefit from rising prices. Thus they wanted generous money supplied by government. As taxpayers, they would benefit from the fact that the government would earn interest on the money created and would thus need fewer taxes (Nettels 1962). As these strong financial interests opposed each other, fights over land banks broke out in various states.

With the bank up and running, he borrowed money from it on behalf of the government to the benefit of himself as owner of the bank. He also conferred on his own bank a monopoly license to issue paper money and the privilege to have its notes accepted for duty and taxes on par with gold (Rothbard 1985/2008). Morris suffered a setback, though. In the charged climate of the fights about land banks in 1785, his Bank of North America was accused of abusing political power. In September 1785, the Philadelphia legislature annulled the bank’s state charter. Morris later declined the offer to be the first secretary of the treasury in 1789 and suggested instead his banker friend Alexander Hamilton.


pages: 406 words: 113,841

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, basic income, benefit corporation, big-box store, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, government statistician, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, job automation, Kickstarter, land bank, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Above all, we could elect people willing to go to bat for valuable communal goods such as higher education; willing, and able, to explain to the public the necessity of raising enough taxes to build protective firewalls around proven success stories such as the Pell Grants and to try out new programs, such as the EOF, so as to reduce the crippling levels of debt too many students today leave college with. LAND BANKS, STATE BANKS, AND THE NORTH DAKOTA WAY Let’s continue thinking about connections. Boosting wages, making higher education more accessible, perhaps setting in place minimum income standards—all are good starting points. But what about building up public and environmental infrastructure? What if there were ways to kill two birds with one stone, using public funds to improve the commons in a way that simultaneously reduced poverty and stimulated a renaissance of American manufacturing and industry?

That’s what the Mott Foundation was doing in Flint, Michigan, a city long bedeviled by high unemployment and low educational attainment levels, where it worked with local companies to train several dozen workers to be able to repair distressed, foreclosed-on properties, gathered together into what was called a “Land Bank”—which they were then allowed to buy at a discount after the work was completed. It was a great idea: tackling blight, rebuilding the value of properties no one wanted, providing an affordable entry point into a housing market from which too many impoverished families had historically been excluded.

See also Guaranteed income; Minimum wage Income distribution, 34, 38 Income inequality, 26–28, 45, 53–54, 55, 81–82 Income volatility, 30–31 India, 251 Indiana, 10, 106 Individual freedom, vs. economic justice, 3, 64 Industries, green, 264–266 Infant mortality, 24, 25, 33–34 Infrastructure, public and private, 263–264 Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, 36 Japan, 245 Job training/retraining programs, 305–306, 306–310 and community building, 308–309, 309–312 Jobs, green, 264–266 Johnson, Arley, 196 Johnson, Kevin, 276 Johnson, Lyndon, 73, 74, 75–78, 216 Johnston, David Cay, 53–54 Joint Economic Committee of Congress, 3 Jones, Jessica, 107 Jones, Van, 264, 265 Jones, Will, 308–309, 320 Joseph, Clara, 67–68 Joseph, Matthew, 59, 322–323 Joseph, Michael, 168–169 Juneau, Denise, 278 Kalbach, Barb, 36–37 Kansas City, Missouri, 117–118 Katz, Michael, 84, 136 Kennedy, John, 73, 74, 76 Kennedy, Robert, 78–79, 80, 96, 200, 230 Kennedy, Teddy, 291 Kentucky, 106 Keynes, John Maynard, 84–85 King, Martin Luther, 79–80, 126 Kitzhaber, John, 227 Koch brothers, 52 Kostelnick, Lauren, 31 Kristof, Nicholas, 219 Kuzman, James, 146–148, 280 Ladd, Helen, 281–282 Lampman, Robert, 3 Land banks, 265. See also State banks Lange, Dorothea, 96 Las Vegas, 60–61, 146–147, 170–171, 280 Latinos, 9, 26, 172–173 Lee, Mike, 39 LePage, Paul, 103, 180 Life and Labour of the People of London (Booth), 65 Life expectancy, 24–25 Limbaugh, Rush, 47, 117–118, 224 Liu, Carol, 40–41 Living wage, 177, 295–296, 297, 298–299, 305.


pages: 252 words: 66,183

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, car-free, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, clean water, confounding variable, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, land bank, lone genius, mass immigration, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, Overton Window, parking minimums, restrictive zoning, rewilding, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SimCity, starchitect, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty

According to the Dallas Federal Reserve, Houston is undergoing a wave of gentrification, with incomes surging in historically low-income neighborhoods near downtown.16 In response, back in 2018, the Houston City Council granted the Houston Community Land Trust an initial endowment of $1 million with a goal of building or converting 1,100 trust homes within five years.17 Working in conjunction with the Houston Land Bank—tasked with managing vacant, abandoned, and dilapidated properties—development is already under way: as of 2020, the Houston CLT has developed 21 homes at a median sale price of $75,000, well below the citywide median of $240,000. If they can pull it off, and eventually scale up the program, Houston might once again serve as a model for centering equity in a post-zoning city.

To their great credit, the current generation of Houston planners are busy undertaking many of the ideas discussed in the next chapter: the city is making major investments in transit, has adopted ambitious bicycle and open space plans, and is working to establish what could soon be the largest land bank in the nation. CHAPTER 10: PLANNING AFTER ZONING 1. Thomas Campanella, “Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning,” Places Journal (April 2011), https://placesjournal.org/article/jane-jacobs-and-the-death-and-life-of-american-planning/?cn-reloaded=1. 2. The author speaks from experience. 3.


pages: 666 words: 131,148

Frommer's Seattle 2010 by Karl Samson

airport security, British Empire, company town, flying shuttle, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, land bank, machine readable, place-making, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, white picket fence

Saving the San Juans The San Juans are so beautiful that they have for some time been on the verge of being loved to death. However, one local organization is doing what it can to preserve the character of the islands. The San Juan County Land Bank ( 36 0/378-4402;www.sjclandbank.org) has been responsible for the acquisition of some of my favorite public open spaces here in the islands. Almost every year the land bank opens new parcels of land to the public, so be sure to check with them to see what new and as-yet-undiscovered green spaces are there to be discovered. Where to Stay Edenwild Inn This modern Victorian country inn, located right in Lopez Village, is a good choice if you’ve come here to bike or want to use your car as little as possible.

A little farther south is Lime Kiln Point State Park (36 0/378-2044;www.parks.wa.gov), the country’s first whale-watching park and a great place to spot these gentle giants in summer. This latter park is open daily from 8am to dusk. Flanking the state park are Deadman Bay Preserve and Lime Kiln Preserve, two properties acquired for public use by the San Juan County Land Bank. Together the state park and the two preserves have more than 3 miles of hiking trails, making this the best hiking area on the island. South of Deadman Bay Preserve, you can also access the shore at the Westside Scenic Preserve. As Westside Road moves inland, a left onto Wold Road will bring you to Pelindaba Lavender Farms, 33 Hawthorne Lane ( 86 6/819-1911 or 36 0/378-4248; www.pelindaba.com).


pages: 281 words: 86,657

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, British Empire, crack epidemic, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, land bank, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, megaproject, messenger bag, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Peter Calthorpe, postindustrial economy, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional

There aren’t many tools left for communities to protect themselves.” At the start of the last decade, the Third Ward as a whole had a population of slightly more than fifteen thousand, of whom roughly twelve thousand were black and about one thousand were white. But Coleman has not focused his land banking on the entire ward—he’s focused on the northern sections, represented most clearly by census tract 3123, concentrated north of Alabama Street. In 2000, census tract 3123 was still almost exclusively black—2,088 African Americans to only 67 white residents. Data from American Community Survey reports toward the end of the decade showed a considerable increase in the white population.

They can, to all intents and purposes, just show up and start digging. The ease of building on small lots next to properties with radically different uses is what led to the accelerated population changes in the Fourth Ward in the 1990s. The Third Ward would have seen essentially the same process except for the amount of land banking that has taken place. Indeed, the southern parts of the Third Ward, closest to Houston’s Museum District and to Texas Southern University, have seen a substantial transformation in the years since 2000. And over the course of a decade, without much attention being paid to it, central Houston in general has lost most of its white working class.


pages: 1,020 words: 339,564

The confusion by Neal Stephenson

correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, land bank, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, Snow Crash, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, urban planning, web of trust

At the moment, one of these—” he held up the Land Bank notes “—buys rather a lot of these.” He indicated the Bank of England notes. “For many are of the view that the Bank of England has failed already, and the Land Bank is ascendant.” “Which amounts to saying that the Juncto will be cast down in the next election, and Harley will lead the Tories to victory.” “I dare not disagree—as much as I’d like it otherwise.” “Then I shall buy a few of these, in exchange for a Bill of Exchange, denominated in thalers, and payable at the House of the Golden Mercury in Leipzig,” said Eliza, indicating the Land Bank notes, “but I shall exchange them immediately for a lot of these.”

“Even by Barock standards, the most vulgar thing I’ve seen,” Eliza pronounced it. BANK OF ENGLAND, it said; and below that was printed a florid and verbose assertion that it—which is to say, this piece of paper—was money. The bills on Daniel’s opposite hand said LAND BANK and supported like claims—if anything, even more pompous. “Whig,” said Daniel, shaking the BANK OF ENGLAND bills, “and Tory,” shaking the LAND BANK bills. “You even have different money!?” “The Bank of England was, as you must know, set up two years ago by the Juncto after it won the election. It is backed—these bills are backed—by the ability of the government to raise money from taxes, lotteries, annuities, and whatever other schemes the big brains of the Juncto can think up.

Now, I tried to fix up your silver mines—that didn’t work because of sabotage, and because we had to compete against Indian slave labor in Mexico. I am sorry it failed. So then I went to Italy and set everything up so that you might, Parliament willing, become the next Queen of England. According to the Tories who are running the Land Bank, the value of that country is 600 million livres tournoises. They are selling grain and importing gold at a terrific clip. There is money there, in other words—not an infinite amount, but enough to pay for a few arithmetickal engines.” “Not only does Parliament have to vote on it, but also lots of people have to die in the right order, before I can be Queen of England.


Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government by Robert Higgs, Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.

Alistair Cooke, American ideology, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, declining real wages, endowment effect, fiat currency, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, manufacturing employment, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, plutocrats, post-industrial society, power law, price discrimination, profit motive, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration

Unfortunately, as Lester Chandler has observed, the President "seems to have paid little attention to wage rates as a determinant of costs of production." 11 Hoover backed various measures to stimulate federal spending and extensions of the government's credit, including increased appropriations for public works and the Federal Land Banks, creation of the Agricultural Credit Banks and the Home Loan Banks, liberalization of the Federal Reserve Banks' lending authority by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932, and passage of the Emergency Relief and Construction Act of 1932, which allowed the federal government to give (officially, to lend) the state governments funds to use for relief of the unemployed.

To make absolutely certain that it would be perceived as an emergency measure, the legislators employed the word three times in the official title alone: "An Act To relieve the existing national economic emergency by increasing agricultural purchasing power, to raise revenue for extraordinary expenses incurred by reason of such emergency, to provide emergency relief with respect to agricultural indebtedness, to provide for the orderly liquidation of joint-stock land banks, and for other purposes."39 The statute's first section declared an emergency, which it described as "in part the consequence of a severe and increasing disparity between the prices of agricultural and other commodities." Depressed conditions in agriculture had "affected transactions in agricultural commodities with a national public interest," asserted the preamble.

See also Marshall Plan Everybody's magazine, 111 Ex parte Milligan, 183 Externalities, 9-10, 18,258 Fair Labor Standards Act, 190-191 Farmers, 81-82, 162, 174-177,208,210 Farmers' Alliances, 97 Farmers Union, 125 Fascism, 211, 240-242, 256-257 Federal Communications Commission, 7-8 Federal Control Act, 146 Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, 178 Federal Emergency Relief Administration, 25, 190 Federal Energy Administration, 253 Federal Energy Office, 253 Federal Farm Board, 175 Federal Land Banks, 164 Federal Reserve Board, 142 Federal Reserve System, 107-108, 121, 206, 260 Federal Trade Commission, 7, 161 Federal Trade Commission Act, 111 Fellner, William, 240 Field, Stephen J., 101, 103 First New Deal, 189-190, 192. See also Great Depression; Roosevelt, Franklin Delano First War Powers Act, 205-206 Fiscal illusion, 65.


pages: 488 words: 144,145

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

He divides the Great Depression into five phases, which he sadly also labels “during my administration,” taking personal responsibility for the terrible events of those early years of the 1930s: October 1929 to April 1931: Liquidation of Stock-Exchange Loans April to August 1931: The Panic in Austria and Germany, Exchange and Gold August to November 1931: The Effects of the British Collapse November 1931 to July 1932: Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Expanding the Land Banks, Creating the Home Loan Banks September 1932 to March 1933: Attempts to Cooperate with Roosevelt After Defeat, Refusal of Roosevelt to Cooperate on Economic Conference or War Debts After his chronicle of the years up to the start of FDRs presidency, the second half of volume two of President Hoover’s memoir is a scathing critique of his successor.

Indeed, the percentage increase in government spending under Hoover was larger than during the first two terms under FDR, at least until the start of WWII.38 While Hoover may not have been afraid to expand the role of government, FDR took the focus and tone of the federal government to a new level of interference with and active oversight of business. Taking a direct example from fascist Italy, the American government created and expanded the new players in our tale of money and debt—namely the government sponsored enterprise (GSE). FDR added to the list of GSEs left over from WWI, including the War Finance Corp (WFC), the Federal Land Bank, and the Sugar Equalization Board, and expanded the powers of the RFC. Everything from export finance to financing for farm exports to residential mortgages was provided through new or expanded government agencies. The housing agency Fannie Mae was created in 1938 in the second part of FDR’s New Deal economic plan, one of many “temporary” Depression-era GSEs that became permanent fixtures in Washington.

Durant, William Durant‘s Folly Earning power, assets (relationship, absence) Ebeling, Richard Eccles, Marriner Glass, opposition pushing on a string Truman anger Economic depression (1882-1884) Economic expansion, Burns limitation Economic growth, generation Economic output, WWI decline Economic Recovery Tax Act (1981) Economic Stabilization Act Economic stagnation, Nixon response Economy, American uncertainty/doubt Economy (angst), American political class (response) Einhorn, David Einstein, Albert Eisenhower, Dwight David defense industrial complex warning election Electrification, impact Embargos, removal (FDR support) Emergency Banking Act (1933) Emergency Banking Relief Act Employment Act (1946) passage Employment maximum, promotion Energy costs, impact Equity markets, decline Erie Railroad collapse control, theft Eurodollars deposits, dollar supply (visibility) Europe American imports, decline collapse credit, U.S. dependence deflation goods flow, American dependence unemployment (1873) WWI debt payment, failure/refusal WWII loans WWI loans European imports, WWI financing requirement European nations, U.S. trade deficit European style corporate statism, American version (FDR endorsement) European Union crisis (2010) emergence success Exchange medium Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) (1933) Executive Branch, power (growth) External deficits, increase (impact) Faris, Ralph Farley, James Farm cooperatives, formation Farm Credit Banks, usage Farmer’s Exchange Bank, failure Farm prices/wages, decline (continuation) Farm sector, commodity prices (collapse) Faulkner, Harold Federal debt (1945-1996) level (1974) shrinkage U.S. government servicing Federal deposit insurance, FDR support Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) idea, proposal panic role permanency Federal expenditures, Hoover avoidance Federal funds rate, increase Federal government greenback issuance, legality (debate) laissez faire role, return post-Civil War debt size (increase), FDR (impact) Federal Home Loan Bank Board, authorization Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBs) authorization Hoover creation Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC) Federal insurance, access Federal Land Bank Federal Monetary Authority Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) creation Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) capitulation federal funds rate, increase interest rate control Federal outlays (1968-1976) Federal outlays (1979-1988) Federal receipts (1929-1996) Federal Reserve Act (1913) amendment, banking lobby (impact) approval Bryan support compromise decentralized features evolution impact passage Byrd perspective political equation, shift Federal Reserve banks, National Monetary Commission organization Federal Reserve Money Federal Reserve System Board of Governors creation, McFadden Act (impact) original composition corportivist reform creation impact Jefferson/Jackson, cautionary views (confirmation) deflationary tone Durant complaints evolution Galbraith description High Tide imperfections independence, retention liquidity provider motivation (2000s) policies, questions rediscounting regulation changes, Warburg opposition RFC, relationship tunnel-vision policies, adoption warrants, purchase (Federal Reserve Act limitation) WWI actions Federal revenues, growth Federal spending, increase Federal Trade Act Fed of New York, discount rate (reduction) Feinberg, Robert Fessenden, William P.


pages: 301 words: 90,276

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

Yet there is no public expectation that Disney should help house the humans who don Mickey Mouse’s costume every day, or that Walmart should provide accommodation, or even a housing allowance, for the millions of its warehouse and store workers. Disney could easily make some of its large parcels of surplus land available for housing, either for its own workers or for others who need it. In Osceola, the company’s land bank includes an undeveloped section of Celebration west of I-4, in a location that would be a short commute for its employees. In 2018, Disney purchased the 965-acre BK Ranch, just southeast of Celebration, which is already zoned for a mixed-use development of three thousand homes.37 Offering some of that land would go a long way toward improving the company’s shabby record of contributions to local housing needs.

(It doesn’t help that many of them maintain a career in real estate development and sales, and so have a professional interest in protecting the private sector’s monopoly on housing.) Custom builder Karl Theobald, a leading local proponent of affordable housing, worked with an area realtor to set up the legal structure for a community land trust in Osceola, but it has not yet been put to use. “We go to the county’s inventory every year, but what it has in its land bank is useless,” he explains. “Pieces get donated to them, or they take ones that are left over, but these are all little splinters, and there’s not enough that’s usable.” As for the motels on 192, the case for converting them into affordable apartment units is as strong as anywhere in the country.


pages: 91 words: 26,009

Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bretton Woods, corporate governance, feminist movement, Frank Gehry, ghettoisation, Howard Zinn, informal economy, land bank, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, RAND corporation, reserve currency, special economic zone, spectrum auction, stem cell, The Chicago School, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

India’s new megacorporations, Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite, are those that have managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot that is spewing money extracted from deep inside the earth.9 It’s a dream come true for businessmen—to be able to sell what they don’t have to buy. The other major source of corporate wealth comes from their land banks. All over the world, weak, corrupt local governments have helped Wall Street brokers, agribusiness corporations, and Chinese billionaires to amass huge tracts of land. (Of course this entails commandeering water too.) In India the land of millions of people is being acquired and handed over to private corporations for “public interest”—for Special Economic Zones (SEZs), infrastructure projects, dams, highways, car manufacture, chemical hubs, and Formula One racing.10 (The sanctity of private property never applies to the poor.)


pages: 363 words: 107,817

Modernising Money: Why Our Monetary System Is Broken and How It Can Be Fixed by Andrew Jackson (economist), Ben Dyson (economist)

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, credit crunch, David Graeber, debt deflation, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, land bank, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, technological determinism, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, unorthodox policies

With the means of payment in general a poor substitute for money, the colonies continued to experiment: In 1652 John Hull set up the ‘Hull Mint’ or ‘tree’ coinage in Massachusetts. The coins produced were used until 1685 when it was removed from circulation by a British decree. In 1675 a private land bank was set up in South Carolina, issuing paper bank notes as convertible securities (collateralised by secured estates). It was however ultimately unsuccessful, because although South Carolina could create money, it failed to get it accepted for general payments.11 A private land bank was also set up in Boston in 1686, and failed for similar reasons. In 1690 the state of Massachusetts began issuing ‘Bills of Credits’. This “paper money of Massachusetts was backed only by the ‘full faith and credit’ of the government”, (Goodwin, 2003, p. 36), rather than land or some other commodity.


The Global Money Markets by Frank J. Fabozzi, Steven V. Mann, Moorad Choudhry

asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency risk, discounted cash flows, discrete time, disintermediation, Dutch auction, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, land bank, large denomination, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market fundamentalism, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, paper trading, Right to Buy, short selling, stocks for the long run, time value of money, value at risk, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Its mission is to provide a steady source of low-cost credit to the U.S. agricultural sector. The FFCS lends money to farmers through a network of borrower-owned financial institutions and related service organizations. Six Farm Credit Banks and one Agricultural Credit Bank make direct long-term real estate loans to farmers through 32 Federal Land Bank Associations. The banks also provide loan funds to various credit associations, which in turn make short-, intermediate-, and long-term loans to farmers. The FFCS is regulated by the Farm Credit Administration. Unlike the agencies discussed to this point, the FFCS does not maintain a direct line of credit with the U.S.

See also Effective federal funds rate Federal Home Loan Bank System (FHL Bank System), 46, 57–59 discount notes, 58–59 floater, issuance, 104 Federal Home Loan Banks, 58 inverse floater, issuance, 103 Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), 45, 53–57, 154–155, 197 CMOs, 162 dealer group, 53 discount notes, 53 Reference Bills, 54–57 auctions, 54 Federal Housing Authority (FHA), 155, 202 Federal Housing Finance Board, 58 Federal Land Bank Associations, 59 Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), 45, 47–53, 154–155, 197 Benchmark Bills, 47–53 CMOs, 162 discount notes, 47 Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), 91 Federal Reserve, 219. See also New York Federal Reserve Bulletin (2001), 93 data series, 93 discontinuation. See Bankers acceptances Open Market Committee, 42 regulations, stipulations, 85 rescue.


pages: 425 words: 117,334

City on the Verge by Mark Pendergrast

big-box store, bike sharing, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, desegregation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, gentrification, global village, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, jitney, land bank, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, power law, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, young professional

Kasim Reed subsequently made it his personal mission to punish Warren, even sitting in the front row during a trial over squalid conditions and code violations on his properties that put him in jail briefly. Reed put the brakes on a deal in which the Blank Foundation was set to pay around $25,000 each for two dozen blighted homes owned by Warren, which would have gone to the Fulton County/City of Atlanta Land Bank Authority for resale and development. While Rick Warren’s conviction may have scared other absentee owners into making minimal improvements, it had little other impact. In December 2014, Emory University law professor Frank Alexander and a coauthor published a landmark document with an extraordinarily boring title: “Judicial in Rem Code Enforcement and Judicial in Rem Tax Sales: Optimal Tools to Combat Vacancy and Abandonment in Atlanta.”

For the others, the tax commissioner will eventually send out a “superpriority” Code Enforcement lien for that amount. If owners don’t pay, the property will then be offered at auction to recoup the demolition cost and any back taxes, but buyers will have to pay at least as much as all the liens. That means no one will likely purchase the property, and it will go to the Fulton County/City of Atlanta Land Bank Authority, which could transfer it to Habitat for Humanity, affordable housing programs, or the like. In this win-win scenario, properties would go back on the tax rolls, new homes would be built, and people in need would occupy them. But as this book went to press, the demolition bills had yet to go out.


pages: 371 words: 122,273

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

And we don’t need to stop there. At the moment, it makes sense for landowners to hoard land. They can wait for it to go up in value as an area becomes desirable before they sell. Indeed, the land may be worth more sitting empty for a few years than if they built affordable homes on it. This is known as ‘land banking’ and you might think of it as a contemporary form of the enclosure that took place in Early Modern England when wealthy people took over common land so that they could charge other people to live or farm on it. You don’t need to look far to see it happening. Consider Oulton, where an investment fund bought up land and waited for it to become more desirable before redeveloping it, displacing the people who call it home in the process.

Act, see Addison Act Howard, Ebenezer 1 Howell, Anthony 1, 2 Hudson, Neal 1 Hughes, Amanda 1 Human City Institute 1 Human Rights Act (1988) 1 Hungary 1 Hungerford, Berkshire, 1 Hunters estate agents 1 I immigration 1, 2, 3 HMOs and 1, 2, 3 ‘hostile environment’ 1, 2 housing market and 1 migrant workers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ‘shadow rented sector’ and 1, 2, 3 Immigration Act (2014) 1 Immigration and Asylum Act (1999) 1 In Defense of Housing (Madden & Marcuse) 1 income 1 Independent 1 India 1 Industrial Revolution 1 Inside Housing magazine 1, 2 Institute for Fiscal Studies 1, 2 Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) 1, 2 Intergenerational Foundation 1 intergenerational inequality, see generations ‘intermediate housing’ 1 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESR) 1 investment funds 1 i Paper (newspaper) 1 Ipsos MORI 1 Ireland, see Northern Ireland; Republic of Ireland Italy 1 J Jackson-Stops estate agency 1 Jenrick, Robert 1, 2 Johnson, Boris 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Johnson, Paul 1 Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) 1 Jones, Carwyn 1 Jones, Colin 1 Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) 1, 2 journalism 1, 2 K Kaakinen, Juha 1, 2, 3 key workers 1, 2, 3, 4 Khan, Sadiq 1, 2, 3 Kimbro, Rachel Tolbert, 1 King Jr, Martin Luther 1 Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward 1 Kohl, Sebastian 1 Kondo, Marie 1 L Labour Party 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 New Labour, 1, 2, 3 Labouring Classes Dwelling Houses Act (1866) 1 Laing, R. D. 1 Lamb, Norman 1 Lammy, David 1 Lancaster 1, 2, 3 ‘land banking’ 1 Land Value Tax 1, 2 Landbay (mortgage lender) 1 Landlord and Tenant Act (1985) 1 landlord licensing 1 Landmark Chambers 1 landowners 1, 2 Latin Elephant (charity) 1 Law of Property Act (1925) 1 Law Society 1 leasehold reform 1 Leeds 1, 2 Leeds Federation of Municipal Tenants Associations 1 Lees, Loretta 1, 2, 3, 4 Leese, Richard 1 Legal & General 1 Legal Action Group (LAG) 1 legal aid 1 Legal Aid Agency (LAA) 1 Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (2012) 1 Lendlease (real estate investment group) 1 Letchworth, Hertfordshire 1 letting agents 1, 2 letting fees 1, 2, 3, 4 ‘levelling up’ 1, 2 LGBTQ+ 1, 2 discrimination 1 Liberal Democrat Party, 1, 2 Lincoln, Abraham 1 Live-In Guardians (property management company) 1 Liverpool 1 Lloyd George, David 1, 2, 3, 4 Lloyd, Toby 1 Loach, Ken 1 local authorities 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Local Government Association (LGA) 1, 2 Local Housing Allowance (LHA) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Localism Act (2011) 1 Location, Location, Location (TV series) 1 location/place 1, 2 London, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 gentrification and 1, 2, 3 Great Dock Strike (1889) 1 guardianship 1, 2 London Housing Panel 1 ‘London Living Rent’, 1 rent control 1, 2 rent strikes 1 London: Aspects of Change (Glass) 1 love, politics of 1 ‘low-price low-income market’ 1 Lowe Guardians (property management company) 1 Lowe, Tim 1 Luxembourg 1 M Macintosh, Kate 1 Macmillan, Harold 1 Madden, David 1, 2 Magpie Project 1 Major, John 1 Manchester 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Marcuse, Peter 1, 2 Marx, Karl 1, 2 May, Theresa 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 McKee, Kim 1, 2, 3, 4 McKibbin, Philip 1 mental health 1, 2, 3, 4 Merkel, Angela 1 Milanović, Branko 1 Mill, John Stuart 1, 2 Milton Keynes 1, 2 Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) 1, 2 mortgages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ‘buy-to-let’ 1, 2, 3, 4 interest rates 1, 2, 3 mortgage interest relief 1 Mulheirn, Ian 1 Munday, Becky 1 Murie, Alan 1 N NatCen Social Research 1 National Audit Office (NAO) 1 National Coal Board (NCB) 1 National Conversation on Immigration 1 National Housing Federation 1 National Insurance 1, 2 National Landlords Association 1 National Referral Mechanism (NRM) 1 National Residential Landlords Association (NRLA) 1, 2 Nationwide house price index 1 Ncube, Timon 1 Neate, Polly 1 Netherlands 1, 2, 3 Newsnight (TV programme) 1, 2 Next Steps Accommodation Programme 1 NHS (National Health Service) 1, 2, 3, 4 Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) 1 Nightmare Neighbour Next Door, The (TV documentary series) 1 No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) 1, 2 ‘non-decent’ homes 1 Norman Shaw South Building, Westminster 1, 2 North Somerset 1, 2 Northern Ireland 1, 2, 3 Nottingham 1 Nuneaton and Bedworth, 1 Nussbaum, Martha 1 O Observer 1 Office for National Statistics (ONS) 1, 2 OfGem 1 Old Rectory, Colchester 1, 2 ‘ontological security’ 1 Orbán, Viktor 1 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 1 Orwell, George 1, 2, 3 Osborne, George 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Oulton, West Yorkshire 1, 2, 3, 4 out-of-borough housing placements 1 Overton Window 1 Overton, Joseph 1 P Palmer, Henry 1, 2 Paragon (mortgage lender) 1 Paris, France 1 Pathfinder programme (Scotland) 1 Peaker, Giles 1, 2, 3, 4 Peckham, London 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Peluffo Soneyra, Santiago 1 Pemberstone Group 1 Pendle, Lancashire 1 People’s Charter (1838) 1 pets 1, 2 phenomenology 1 ‘phoenixing’ 1 Pickett, Kate 1 Piketty, Thomas 1 Pincher, Christopher 1 Piven, Frances Fox 1 Poetics of Space, The (Bachelard) 1 Policy in Practice (software company) 1 Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (Piven & Cloward) 1 Portugal 1 poverty 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 child poverty 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 poverty premium 1 ‘relative poverty’, 1 Powell, Lucy 1 Preece, Jenny 1 Pregnant Then Screwed campaign group 1 Prescott, John 1 PricewaterhouseCoopers 1 Pritchard, Rebecca 1 private developers 1, 2, 3, 4 private landlords 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 bad practice 1 ‘buy-to-let’ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 complaints 1, 2 energy efficient homes 1 free market and 1 ‘friendlords’ 1 homophobia 1 Housing Benefit discrimination 1 intimidation 1, 2 landlord licensing 1, 2, 3 pets 1, 2 racial discrimination 1 repairs and maintenance 1, 2 rogue landlords 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ‘shadow rented sector’ 1, 2, 3 see also guardianship; Housing Act (1988); housing standards Property Guardian Providers Association (PGPA) 1 Property Ladder (TV series) 1 property values, see house prices Protect Programme 1 protected tenancies 1 ‘psychosocial sense’ 1 public health 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 mental health 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 physical health 1, 2, 3, 4 see also coronavirus pandemic Public Health Act (1875) 1 Public Health England 1 Pussy Riot (musical group) 1 Pye, Janet 1 R race and ethnicity 1, 2, 3, 4 discrimination 1, 2 homelessness and 1, 2, 3 see also immigration Rachman, Peter 1, 2 ‘Rachmanism’ 1 Rashford, Marcus 1 Readman, Cindy and John 1, 2, 3 Redcar, North Yorkshire 1 Rees, Marvin 1 Reeve, Kesia 1, 2 Reeve-Lewis, Ben 1, 2 Reform Act 1832: 1, 2 1867: 1 1884: 1 Remes, Gyula 1 rent 1, 2, 3, 4 cost to household income ratio 1, 2 Local Housing Allowance (LHA) 1 low-income renters, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 rent control 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 rent rises 1 rent strikes 1 rent trap 1 unaffordable private rents 1 Rent Act (1957) 1 Rent Pressure Zones (Scotland) 1, 2, 3, 4 Rent Repayment Order (RRO) 1, 2 Rent Smart 1 Renters’ Reform Bill 1, 2, 3, 4 rentier capitalism 1 Republic of Ireland 1, 2 Residential Landlords Association 1, 2 Resolution Foundation 1, 2 Rhodes, David 1 Ricardo, David 1 Rice, Alan 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Ridley, Nicholas 1 Rigby, Mandy 1 Right to Buy scheme, see social housing ‘right to housing’ 1 Right to Rent scheme 1 Road to Wigan Pier, The (Orwell) 1, 2 Rogers, Will 1 rogue landlords, see private landlords Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf) 1 ‘root shock’ 1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 1, 2 Rowntree, Joseph 1 Roy, Arundhati 1 Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) 1, 2 Rugg, Julie 1, 2 S Sà, Filipa 1 Safer Renting 1, 2, 3 Safer Renting: Journeys in the Shadow Private Rented Sector (Reeve-Lewis) 1 Saltney, Wales 1 Sassen, Saskia 1, 2 Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) 1 Scotland 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Section 21 evictions, see evictions secure tenancies 1 Seifert, Richard 1 Seychelles 1 ‘shadow rented sector’ 1, 2 Shared Ownership scheme 1, 2 Sheen, Kelly 1 Sheen, Morgan 1, 2 Shelter (homeless charity) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 Shnapp, Sophie 1 Shrubsole, Guy 1 single mothers 1 Skelton, Noel 1 slavery 1, 2, 3 Slavery Abolition Act (1833) 1 slum housing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Smith, Adam 1, 2 Smith, David 1 Smith, Paul 1 social care cap (2021) 1 social class 1, 2, 3, 4 social inequality 1, 2 middle-classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 social mobility 1, 2 class divide 1 working classes 1, 2, 3 social housing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 housing standards, 1 in the 1950s 1 ‘priority need’ 1 public health and 1 Right to Buy scheme 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 state-subsidised housing 1 social media 1 social status 1 Somerset Live 1 South Africa 1 South East Guardians (property management company) 1 Southwark Council 1 Sovereign housing association 1, 2 Spanish Flu pandemic (1918–19) 1 Spectator 1 Spencer, Roz 1 Spirit Level, The (Pickett & Wilkinson) 1 squatters 1 Stamp Duty 1, 2, 3 Starmer, Keir 1, 2, 3 Stepney Tenants’ Defence League 1 Stevenage, Hertfordshire 1 Stokes Croft, Bristol 1 Stokes Croft Land Trust (SCLT) 1 Strang, Jim 1 Stratton, Allegra 1 Sugar Hill Close and Wordsworth Drive housing estate, Oulton 1, 2 Sunak, Rishi 1 Sunday Times Best Places to Live in the UK guide 1 Rich List 1 Sutton Trust, 1 Switzerland 1 Syrop, Helen 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 T Tagore, Rabindranath 1 taxation 1 temporary accommodation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Tenant Fees Act (2019) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 tenants 1, 2 deposits 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 letting fees 1, 2, 3, 4 protected tenancies 1 rent strikes 1 repairs and maintenance 1, 2 rights 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 stress and 1 tenancy contracts 1 tenants’ unions 1 see also evictions; guardianship; private landlords; public health Thanet, Kent 1 Thatcher, Margaret 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Thorpe, Shanene 1 Trade Union Congress (TUC) 1 trade unions 1 trafficking 1 ‘trickle-down housing’ 1 Tropicana, Weston-super-Mare 1 Tsemberis, Sam 1 Tuan, Yi-Fu 1 tuberculosis (TB) 1 Tudor Walters Report (1918) 1 Tunstall, Rebecca 1 Turning Point service, Glasgow 1 Twain, Mark 1 Two Saints (homelessness support group) 1 U UKIP (UK Independence Party) 1 United Nations (UN) 1 United Tenants’ Association 1 Universal Basic Income 1, 2 Universal Credit 1, 2 University of Granada, Spain 1 urban regeneration 1, 2 Urban Studies journal 1 Uruguay 1 V Valuations Office Agency (VOA) 1 Vasudevan, Alexander 1 ‘Vent Your Rent’ campaign 1, 2 Voices of Bristol: Gentrification and Us (Palmer) 1 W Wales 1, 2, 3, 4 Walters, John Tudor 1, 2 Warm Homes Nest scheme (Wales) 1 Watchtower Security Solutions Ltd 1 wealth 1, 2, 3 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 1 welfare benefits 1 welfare state 1, 2, 3 Westminster, London 1 Weston Housing Action 1 Weston-super-Mare, North Somerset, 1, 2 Who Owns England?


Masters of Mankind by Noam Chomsky

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, failed state, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land bank, land reform, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, nuremberg principles, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

There is no evidence that this trend has at all changed in the last eight years. It may even be outpacing the minuscule efforts at land reform. . . . Will the Congress in Manila, composed of the very same rural banking elite, ever vote the necessary funds to finance the Agricultural Credit Administration, the Land Bank and Cooperatives?44 The report may have gone on to indicate that this situation is, largely, a consequence of American colonial policy, and it also might have ventured a prediction as to the fate of those driven off the land under “rationalization” in a country that has been described as an American vegetable garden.


pages: 182 words: 53,802

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks by Ann Pettifor

Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, The Chicago School, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail

While he is remembered (and vilified) for both a colourful private life and events that spun out of his control in France in 1720, he had a much better understanding of money than his much-celebrated fellow countryman Adam Smith. Law’s books Money and Trade: With a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money (1705) and Essay on a Land Bank (1720) paved the way for the advanced monetary systems in place today.4 Presidents Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) and Abraham Lincoln (1809–61) also understood the money system and had a healthy fear of Wall Street or what Lincoln called ‘the money power’. But, like Keynes, Schumpeter, Minsky and Galbraith, they struggled to share their understanding of credit and money with their colleagues in the economics profession.


Meghnad Desai Marxian economic theory by Unknown

book value, business cycle, commoditize, Corn Laws, full employment, land bank, land reform, means of production, Meghnad Desai, p-value, price mechanism, profit motive, technological determinism

The American Civil War is another example (once again rather simplified) of a confrontation between industrial capitalism of the North and the feudal South'. Another element is the transformation of comnercial and merchant capitalists into industrial capitalists. This transformation is facilitated by a variety of institutional and legal forms, e.g. financial institutions such as Land Banks or State Industrial Banks, reforms involving confiscation of fOreign capital or land-holdings. In different countries, particular events have dictated the combination of these various forms which have led to the concentration of means of production in the hands of the capit_lists. lO It needs to be kept in mind constantly that while a model of capitalism with two antagonistic classes is at the heart of Marxian economics, in any particular historical (concrete) situation, one has to take into account many classes.


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Because credit was easy to get, buyers could pay more for housing, and so house prices did rise – encouraging still more lending, on the grounds that the collateral was an appreciating asset. As long as house prices rose faster than the rate of interest, buyers were winning. Rising prices produce little response from house-builders in terms of increasing the supply of housing because they want to avoid risking a fall in prices and rents. They accumulate ‘land banks’, but they only build on these when the prospective profits are highest, thereby creating artificial scarcity.107 They can make more money from building and selling a few houses while prices rise than from building many and risking a lower price. Planning restrictions on new developments can also help to maintain this scarcity.

First, speculation in property markets. Property developers typically buy up plots close to city centres, in the hope of converting them to a new use, usually commercial and office development, that will allow higher rents to be charged than for the present uses. As we’ve seen, they tend to accumulate plots as ‘land banks’ and postpone development until prices are rising. In the meantime, the existing buildings are usually left to decline, producing the typically decaying environments of our inner cities, with all the social costs that go with them. In this case, far from the speculation causing an increase in supply, it holds it back.


pages: 215 words: 71,155

Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories About the Great Good Places at the Heart of Our Communities by Ray Oldenburg

Celebration, Florida, gentrification, Jane Jacobs, land bank, market design, New Urbanism, place-making, Ray Oldenburg, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, The Great Good Place, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city

At the city’s public TIF hearings, UIC administrators used the same rhetoric that it has always used against people who try to preserve third places. They said coalition members were “anti-development,” wanting to “hold back job creation,” and were “absolutely insane.” None of them mentioned the hundreds of jobs, businesses, and property tax revenue that had disappeared as a result of UIC’s land banking. The city read off a long list of community organizations that supported South Campus expansion. Every one of these groups did business with the city or UIC. The TIF was pushed through the city council without any dissent. Six years after demolition of most of the neighborhood, nothing has been built except for some perpetually empty parking lots and a few ball fields, which are the minimum structures that the city code requires for a public institution to build on vacant land.


pages: 782 words: 187,875

Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, declining real wages, equity risk premium, European colonialism, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, foreign exchange controls, German hyperinflation, global macro, housing crisis, implied volatility, intangible asset, it's over 9,000, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, refrigerator car, reserve currency, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, uptick rule, value at risk, yield curve

The funds came from the banks and totaled $500 million, with the ability to borrow another billion.132 At the same time, Hoover was looking for solutions for the collapsing real estate market. To stop foreclosures on mortgages of “the homes and farms of responsible people,” he sought to create a system of Home Loan Discount Banks, which he did in 1932. In the meantime, he worked with both the insurance and real estate agencies to suspend foreclosures on farm loans by the Federal Land Banks, while providing the institution with $1 billion so that it could expand its lending.133 The policies were well received and broadly inspired confidence among investors. The stock market rallied in response, up 35 percent from its October bottom to November 9, with a jump of more than 10 percent on the day the National Credit Association was announced.

–Federal Reserve Bulletin November 1, 1931 Hoover Gives $2,500 to Fund to Assist the Idle of District (NYT) “President Hoover gave $2,500 today toward District of Columbia unemployment relief. E.C. Graham, chairman of the city’s employment committee, was notified of the donation by a telephone call from Lawrence Richey.” –New York Times November 3, 1931 Propose to Hoover Home Credits Plan; Building and Loan League Men Suggest Federal Land Bank Aid to Their Societies –New York Times November 4, 1931 Realty Credit Aid Studied by Hoover; President Confers with Glass on Bank System to Rediscount Urban Mortgages –New York Times November 5, 1931 Bennett Approves Hoover Credit Plan; Opinion to Broderick Says It Is Legal for State Banks to Participate in Pool “Banks under the supervision of the State Banking Department may use funds legally to participate in the plan of the National Credit Corporation, which was founded at the suggestion of President Hoover to stabilize the financial situation, according to an opinion rendered yesterday by Attorney General John J.


pages: 192

Kicking Awaythe Ladder by Ha-Joon Chang

Asian financial crisis, business cycle, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, fear of failure, income inequality, income per capita, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, land bank, land reform, liberal world order, moral hazard, open economy, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, scientific management, short selling, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus

Under Napoleon III, the French state actively encouraged infrastructural developments and established various institutions of research and teaching. It also contributed to the modernization of the country's financial sector by granting limited liability to, investment in and overseeing of modern, large-scale financial institutions like Credit Mobilier, Credit Fonder (the Land Bank) and Credit Lyonnais.u3 On the trade policy front, Napoleon III signed the famous Anglo-French trade treaty (the Cobden-Chevalier treaty) of 1860, which reduced French tariffs quite substantially and heralded a period of trade liberalism on the Continent that lasted until 1879.134 However, as we can see from Table 2.2, the degree of protectionism in France was already quite low on the eve of the treaty (lower than in Britain at the time), and therefore the reduction in protectionism that resulted from this treaty was relatively minor.


pages: 301 words: 77,626

Home: Why Public Housing Is the Answer by Eoin Ó Broin

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, financial deregulation, Future Shock, global macro, housing crisis, Housing First, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, low interest rates, mortgage debt, negative equity, open economy, passive investing, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, the built environment

The Planning and Development Act 2000 obliged Local Authorities to develop six-year development plans to better coordinate all aspects of their administrative areas’ development, including proper zoning and planning. The 2000 Act also introduced the regulations governing Strategic Development Zones which were an attempt both to allow for more integrated master-planning of large, important public and private land banks while at the same time streamlining and fast-tracking the planning and decision-making – two objectives that do not always sit easily together. The most notable Strategic Development Zones have been those in Dublin’s Docklands and Adamstown in the west of the city. While the former has been heavily criticised for its social cleansing of the local working-class communities surrounding Sheriff Street to make way for more upmarket residential development, the latter has emerged, recession delays notwithstanding, as an example of better planning and more integrated residential and social-economic development.


pages: 275 words: 84,980

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives) by David Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, creative destruction, credit crunch, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, index card, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, Northern Rock, Pingit, prediction markets, price stability, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social graph, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons

Around the same time as the technology of paper money was rebooted, the last great monetary innovation of the pre-modern age, central banking, arose around the coffee houses of Amsterdam. What were they smoking? But the idea spread, and in 1692 the Bank of England was created for the admirable purpose of financing wars against France. France, incidentally, went on to become the source of all sorts of crazy money experiments that ended in disaster: the assignats, John Law’s land bank, the Latin Monetary Union and … the euro. The past begins with money as debt in commodities and then a commodity (anything from grain to seashells to gold) or a claim on such. The agricultural revolution led to the rise of cities and the dawn of banking and, eventually, to coins. Stretching from antiquity to early modern times, the technological implementations went from cuneiform to banknotes to printed cheques.


Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice by Molly Scott Cato

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bretton Woods, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, deskilling, energy security, food miles, Food sovereignty, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job satisfaction, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Money creation, mortgage debt, Multi Fibre Arrangement, passive income, peak oil, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Rupert Read, seminal paper, the built environment, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, tontine, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

Certainly, proponents of the land tax, including Henry George, saw the rentier class, those who lived from the income their land ownership generated, as holding back economic progress. They could merely sit on their land and live a comfortable life without having to engage in useful economic activity. A similar argument is made today against the holding of land for speculative reasons, including by supermarkets with their so-called ‘land banks’.15 A land tax would require the tax to be paid on the land whether it was put to productive use or not, thus increasing the pressure for using land for economic activity. This might run counter to green thinking about limits to growth and the need for ‘de-growth’ or a reduction in levels of economic activity as measured by GDP (for more see Chapter 7).


pages: 334 words: 82,041

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature by George Monbiot

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, bank run, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, dematerialisation, demographic transition, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, first-past-the-post, full employment, Gini coefficient, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Leo Hollis, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, peak oil, place-making, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, urban sprawl, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, World Values Survey

Throughout the country, they become prisoners of bad design, and so do adults.5 Without safe and engaging places in which they can come together, no tribe forms. So parents must play the games that children would otherwise play among themselves, and everyone is bored to tears. The exclusion of children arises from the same pathology that denies us decent housing. In the name of market freedom, the volume house-builders, sitting on their land banks, are free to preside over speculative chaos, while we are free to buy dog kennels priced like palaces in placeless estates designed so badly that community is dead on arrival. Millions, given the chance, might want to design and build their own homes, but almost no plots are available, as the big builders have seized them.


pages: 207 words: 86,639

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle, Andrew Simms

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Crossrail, delayed gratification, deskilling, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, financial deregulation, financial exclusion, financial innovation, full employment, garden city movement, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, light touch regulation, loss aversion, mega-rich, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working-age population

Like other owner–occupiers, mutual homeowners will have the opportunity to invest in their home and the incentive to look after and improve it. At the same time, the land can be held in trust for the benefit of future generations and the community as a whole. Successful examples already exist but there is now a role of more ambitious community land banks that would create scope to find a match with new municipal bonds or other forms of targeted, low-interest capital. 11 Take a ‘social investment approach’ to public services, measure and reward broader value creation Unprecedented investment in banking stability has been justified on the lines that the cost of doing nothing would be far greater.


pages: 268 words: 81,811

Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History by Liam Vaughan

algorithmic trading, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, data science, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, eurozone crisis, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, Great Grain Robbery, high net worth, High speed trading, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, land bank, margin call, market design, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Navinder Sarao, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ronald Reagan, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, Stephen Hawking, the market place, Timothy McVeigh, Tobin tax, tulip mania, yield curve, zero-sum game

Not all residents were happy at the prospect of having their countryside blighted by armies of ninety-foot structures, but MacKinnon and Dupont had a contact in Edinburgh they said was uniquely placed to unlock the country’s riches: a quantity surveyor and property developer by the name of Martin Davie, who had founded one of the first businesses to spring up in response to the government’s renewable energy pledge. Davie’s bedside manner left something to be desired—he’d reportedly brought the inhabitants of Ayrshire to tears during one consultation meeting—but he had struck an exclusivity deal with one of the country’s biggest land banks, giving him an in with a long list of farmers and landowners who were potentially amenable to hosting turbines on their property. Davie suggested he and Nav go into business. Nav would provide the capital—an initial $16 million plus a pledge to provide a further $8 million if it was needed—while Davie would run the operation day to day, identifying sites, arranging for surveys, and securing the relevant approvals.


pages: 305 words: 73,935

The Cohousing Handbook: Building a Place for Community by Chris Scotthanson, Kelly Scotthanson

Buy land – they’re not making it any more, card file, index card, intentional community, land bank, off grid, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering

Take-out loan: Private mortgages used by individuals to purchase the private residences after construction is complete. Unit pricing: The prices established for each dwelling unit in your community, adding up to the total project cost. Value: What someone else is willing to pay for a finished product or services. Vendor financing: Financing provided by the seller, typically of land. Banking Set up a relationship with a bank early in the development process. A good relationship with a bank can have long-term benefits to your group when it comes 181 182 THE COHOUSING HANDBOOK time to borrow money later. A bank with records of your group’s income and cash flow over a period of time is more likely to lend you money when you need it.


pages: 284 words: 92,387

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement by David Graeber

Bretton Woods, British Empire, company town, corporate personhood, David Graeber, deindustrialization, dumpster diving, East Village, feminist movement, financial innovation, George Gilder, John Markoff, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, Lao Tzu, late fees, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, planetary scale, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, working poor

Mobilizations, mass meetings, and threats of popular uprising continued. As before the Revolution, many of these protests centered on debt. After the war, there was a heated debate over what to do about the Revolutionary War debt. The popular demand was to let it inflate away into nothing and base the currency on paper notes issued by local “land banks” under public control. The Continental Congress took the opposite approach, following the advice of wealthy Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris (apparently no relation to Gouverneur) that wealthy speculators who’d bought up the debt at depreciated prices should be paid in full. This, he said, would cause wealth to flow “into the hands of those who would render it most productive”; at the same time, creating a single, central bank, on the model of the Bank of England, would allow the national debt to circulate as “new medium of commerce.”10 This system, of making government war debt the basis of the currency, was tried and true, and in a way it’s the one we still have now in the Federal Reserve—but in the early days of the republic the ramifications for simple farmers who ended up effectively having to pay the debt were catastrophic.


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

., a former CEO and later chairman of General Motors, and E. Linn Draper Jr., formerly the CEO and chairman of American Electric Power, both served on The Nature Conservancy’s board of directors: “Past Directors of The Nature Conservancy,” Nature Conservancy, http://www.nature.org; David B. Ottaway and Joe Stephens, “Nonprofit Land Bank Amasses Billions,” Washington Post, May 4, 2003. BUSINESS COUNCIL: “Working with Companies: Business Council,” Nature Conservancy, http://www.nature.org; BOARD OF DIRECTORS: “About Us: Board of Directors,” Nature Conservancy, http://www.nature.org. 18. “Consolidated Financial Statements,” Nature Conservancy, June 30, 2012, pp. 20-21; “Consolidated Financial Statements,” Nature Conservancy, June 30, 2013, p. 21; Naomi Klein, “Time for Big Green to Go Fossil Free,” The Nation, May 1, 2013; FOOTNOTE: Mark Tercek email communication to senior managers, August 19, 2013. 19.

Gus Speth, “American Environmentalism at the Crossroads,” speech, Climate Ethics and Climate Equity series, Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics, University of Oregon, April 5, 2011. 32. “Corporations,” Conservation Fund, http://www.conservationfund.org; “History,” Conservation International, http://www.conservation.org, version saved by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine on December 3, 2013, http:// web.archive.org. 33. Ottaway and Stephens, “Nonprofit Land Bank Amasses Billions”; Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway, “Nonprofit Sells Scenic Acreage to Allies at a Loss,” Washington Post, May 6, 2003; Monte Burke, “Eco-Pragmatists; The Nature Conservancy Gets in Bed with Developers, Loggers and Oil Drillers,” Forbes, September 3, 2001. 34. “Environmentalists Disrupt Financial Districts in NYC, San Francisco,” Associated Press, April 23, 1990; Donatella Lorch, “Protesters on the Environment Tie Up Wall Street,” New York Times, April 24, 1990; Martin Mittelstaedt, “Protesters to Tackle Wall Street,” Globe and Mail, April 23, 1990. 35.


pages: 334 words: 103,106

Inheritance by Leo Hollis

British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, coronavirus, Fellow of the Royal Society, forensic accounting, high net worth, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, lockdown, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, place-making, side hustle, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning

Across the bourse, an overambitious stock price was jokingly dismissed as ‘bare-bon’d’.21 The relationship between land and finance was now firmly established. Land represented not just a place to stash value but also an abstracted, futures market. This was seen in the proliferation of land-based financial instruments, the land bank and the mortgage, to finance and secure deals. * * * These machinations and financial instruments were as important to the goings-on at Millbank as within the City walls. While the Manor of Ebury was now Sir Thomas’s property, Dame Mary kept an interest in her inheritance. The couple had to continue to work with the Tregonwells, who still had interests in the widow’s third of the estate.


pages: 1,199 words: 384,780

The system of the world by Neal Stephenson

bank run, British Empire, cellular automata, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, high net worth, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, land bank, large denomination, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, place-making, Snow Crash, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

I know that the Tories have established their own Bank, as a rival and a counterpoise to the Bank of England. But the Bank of England is capitalized with East India shares. The equity of the Tories’ Land Bank is, simply, land. And East India trade grows from year to year. But of land there is a fixed quantity, unless you mean to emulate the Dutch, and manufacture your own.” “This is where you need to be set to rights, Dr. Waterhouse. The Land Bank is an antiquarian folly, for just the reasons you have set forth. But this in no way signifies that the Bank of England holds a monopoly. On the contrary. With all due respect to the busy, but misguided men of the Juncto, their Bank’s health is as precarious as the Queen’s.

Whether you go right, toward Bishopsgate, or left up Pig toward Gresham’s College, you will in a few moments come to the offices of the South Sea Company, which, though it is only three years old, already spans the interval between those two ways.” “And what do you propose I should do there?” “Invest! Open an account! Align your interests!” “Is it just another Tory land bank?” “Oh, on the contrary! You are not the only one to perceive the wisdom of investing in the future increase of foreign trade!” “The South Sea Company, then, has such interests…where? South America?” “In its original conception, yes. But, as of a few months ago, its true wealth lies in Africa.”


pages: 357 words: 110,017

Money: The Unauthorized Biography by Felix Martin

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Graeber, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invention of writing, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, plutocrats, private military company, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart transportation, South Sea Bubble, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

The Bank of Scotland had been established in 1695, but had remained underdeveloped by comparison with the Bank of England, and in 1704 suffered a calamitous run. 3. Law, 1705. 4. Ibid., p. 100. 5. Law, 1720, p. 91. 6. Ibid. 7. See chapter 5. 8. Law, 1720, p. 94. 9. Ibid. 10. Law, 1705, p. 118. 11. Ibid. In his early works—his 1704 Essay on a Land Bank and his 1705 Money and Trade—Law advocated using land as the standard of monetary value—and it is to land that he is referring here. He believed land to be preferable to precious metals because it was understood by common people to be valuable, of limited supply (thereby imposing a limit on money issuance by the sovereign and quelling fears of overissuance), and under domestic ownership and control.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). B. FINE AND D. MILONAKIS From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics: The Shifting Boundaries between Economics and the Other Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 2009). From Pin to PIN What is the first ever thing written about in economics? Gold? Land? Banking? Or international trade? The answer is the pin. Not the one that you use for your credit cards. But that little metal thing that most of you do not use – that is, unless you have long hair and like to keep it tidy or make your own clothes. The making of the pin is the subject of the very first chapter of what is commonly (albeit mistakenly)1 considered to be the first economics book, namely, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith (1723–90).


pages: 297 words: 108,353

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles by William Quinn, John D. Turner

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, government statistician, Greenspan put, high-speed rail, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Right to Buy, Robert Shiller, Shenzhen special economic zone , short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, the built environment, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban planning

Debt-to-equity swaps were considered in Spain, Portugal, Piedmont, Denmark and Sweden, and proposals to set up colonial trading companies reached Russia, Vienna and Sicily. The motivation in each was broadly similar: a Spanish conversion scheme was sold to the king as a means to ‘imperceptibly pay off’ his debts, and a proposal to create a Russian land bank argued that it would enable the Tsar to raise funds for warfare. Hamburg, Venice, Spain and Portugal also experienced minor financial booms.56 However, the level of marketability in financial markets was generally too low for any significant bubble to develop outside of England and France. CAUSES As well as being the first documented financial bubbles, the 1720 bubbles were notable for having been explicitly and deliberately created by a small number of people.


pages: 343 words: 41,228

Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds - the Original Classic Edition by Charles MacKay

clean water, invention of gunpowder, invisible hand, joint-stock company, land bank, railway mania, South Sea Bubble, the market place

It is generally believed that he returned to Edinburgh in the year 1700. It is certain that he published in that city his Proposals and Reasons for constituting a Council of Trade. This pamphlet did not excite much attention. 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 In a short time afterwards he published a project for establishing what he called a Land-bank 2* , the notes issued by which were never to exceed the value of the entire lands of the state, upon ordinary interest, or were to be equal in value to the land, with the right to enter into possession at a certain time. The project excited a good deal of discussion in the Scottish parliament, and a motion for the establishment of such a bank was brought forward by a neutral party, called the Squadrone, whom Law had interested in his favour.

Louis is reported to have inquired whether the projector were a Catholic, and, on being answered in the negative, to have declined having any thing to do with him. 3* It was after this repulse that he visited Italy. His mind being still occupied with schemes of finance, he proposed to Victor Amadeus, duke of Savoy, to establish his land-bank in that country. The duke replied that his dominions were too circumscribed for the execution of so great a project, and that he was by far too poor a potentate to be ruined. He advised him, however, to try the King of France once more; for he was sure, if he knew any thing of the French character, that the people would be delighted with a plan, not only so new, but so plausible.


pages: 364 words: 112,681

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, failed state, financial engineering, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Global Witness, high net worth, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, income inequality, joint-stock company, land bank, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, medical malpractice, Navinder Sarao, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Sloane Ranger, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

After the members of the jury found him guilty, the judge gave them a life’s exemption from doing jury service again, and they gave him a round of applause. Strange though it may sound, these two bizarre cases are just a tiny part of the criminal epidemic connected to Ronald Raven’s old home: land-banking fraud, VAT fraud, timeshare mis-selling, they all trace back here. Media outlets in Norway, Italy and Romania, as well as Britain, Ukraine and the United States, have detailed crimes linking back to this one house. In one curious crime, a gang of inept crooks pretended to make a film so as to claim tax relief; then, when they were caught, actually did make a film, as if that would somehow erase their original misdeed.


pages: 356 words: 112,271

Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response by Tony Connelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, centre right, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, land bank, LNG terminal, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, open borders, personalized medicine, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, tech worker, éminence grise

But officials can’t afford to wait until a deal is done. ‘We’re going to be looking at customs declarations on day one,’ says a member of the Revenue team. ‘We have to plan on that basis. But we may find that when we have to start, we can’t move fast enough.’ The team is discreetly talking to the Office of Public Works (OPW) about the government’s land banks. While there is a healthy stock on the eastern part of the border, there is less land on the western side. Revenue is also tendering for a new IT system that will be compatible with the Union Customs Code. This can be funded by the EU, since Ireland collects VAT and tariff receipts on the EU’s behalf (Ireland earns €50 million each year in the process).


pages: 388 words: 125,472

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It by Owen Jones

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, disinformation, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Dyson, Jon Ronson, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, night-watchman state, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, Overton Window, plutocrats, popular capitalism, post-war consensus, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

The language used was deliberately inflammatory, attempting to paint the Labour leader as a dangerous extremist. Miliband’s speech ‘raised the hairs on the back of my neck’, declared John Cridland, the director of the CBI, the big-business federation. According to the Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, Miliband’s commitment to a crackdown on land-banking amounted to ‘Mugabe-style expropriations’, while Graeme Leach, chief economist at the Institute of Directors, saw it as ‘a Stalinist attack on property rights’. Miliband, frothed David Cameron, wanted to live in ‘a Marxist universe’; according to Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, resolutely on script, Miliband had voiced ‘essentially the argument Karl Marx made in Das Kapital’.


pages: 447 words: 126,219

The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How It Changed the City Forever by Christian Wolmar

Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, British Empire, Crossrail, financial engineering, full employment, gentrification, invention of the telephone, junk bonds, land bank, lateral thinking, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, South Sea Bubble, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

However, none of these developments were on the Metropolitan’s own land and its extensive holdings were to be the real catalyst to the creation of Metroland. The company had been very fortunate – or possibly far-sighted – when in two Acts of Parliament during the mid 1880s it had separated off the finances of its land bank, accumulated as a result of deals with landowners. Normally, railway companies were precluded from developing surplus land they acquired and were required to dispose of it. However, the Metropolitan uniquely had the right to grant building leases and to sell ground rents, a concession the company had won during the early days of the Metropolitan in its negotiations with the City of London.


pages: 497 words: 123,718

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, airline deregulation, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bob Geldof, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, full employment, global village, high net worth, land bank, land reform, large denomination, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Presidents Jefferson, Monroe, and Madison—all of whom were Virginia tobacco growers and slave-owners who were mortgaged up to their eyeballs—allowed their London private bankers to twist in the wind, struggling to collect their loans in U.S. courts. • In 1841-42, eight U.S. states and the Territory of Florida defaulted on all their debts—twice the size of the federal government’s debt at the time. As in the case of Third World debt, most of the proceeds turned out to have been borrowed abroad and invested in lousy projects—for example, land banks controlled by big plantation owners. This produced one of the first “emerging market” debt crises in history. • In 1933, under the influence of companies that were desperate to survive the Great Depression, the U.S. Congress unilaterally abrogated the “gold clause” for all corporate bonds listed on the New York Stock Exchange.


Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World by Michael Schuman

Admiral Zheng, British Empire, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, Great Leap Forward, land bank, moveable type in China, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The achievement convinced the emperor, another mythical figure named Shun, that Yu could be trusted with the throne. Yu, as is considered decorous, protested that the job should go to someone more worthy, but Shun would have none of that. “Go and attend to your duties,” Shun directed.2 That he did, with unparalleled flair. He surveyed the land, banked up marshes, and improved the roads, and farmers flourished. Governing with virtue, he justly distributed the resources of the realm to aid the poorest provinces, thus ensuring widespread prosperity. Yu’s family, however, broke with political precedent. His two esteemed predecessors—Emperors Yao and Shun—had designated their successors based on merit, not blood.


pages: 385 words: 128,358

Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in a Global Market by Steven Drobny

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital controls, central bank independence, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Greenspan put, high batting average, implied volatility, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, inventory management, inverted yield curve, John Meriwether, junk bonds, land bank, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Maui Hawaii, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, panic early, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, tail risk, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vision Fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

If we find a cheap real estate company, we’re happy to buy the stock.We currently have exposure to real estate stocks in Poland, Finland, Sweden, Spain, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, and Taiwan, yet we don’t own a single building or piece of land.We also own stocks of real estate bankers, builders, developers, land banks, real estate investment trusts (REITs), and so on. How correlated is the real estate allocation to the 20 percent that you have in equities? We haven’t been involved long enough to get a reliable number. All I know is that it has done well, but even that doesn’t mean anything. Globally, real estate could be peaking right now, but if it starts coming down, we’ll hit our stop-loss and get out.


pages: 442 words: 130,526

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, business climate, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, Joseph Schumpeter, land bank, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, Meghnad Desai, middle-income trap, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, special economic zone, spectrum auction, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism, young professional

“In police, tax collection, education, health, power, water supply—in nearly every routine service—there is rampant absenteeism, indifference, incompetence, and corruption,” he wrote.57 Acquiring land was one notorious problem, where complex rules made it hard for businesses to buy plots directly from farmers, forcing them to rely on government-held “land banks” instead. Bureaucrats also controlled reclassification for industrial use, allowing them to vastly increase land values. All of this was an invitation to collusion, giving birth to what was often described as a “land mafia,” meaning a loose coalition of entrepreneurs and officials who plotted to buy up land, reclassify it and sell it on for huge profits.


The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Edward Glaeser, end world poverty, European colonialism, failed state, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Live Aid, microcredit, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, TSMC, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

The system of formal titles thus gradually lost correspondence with those who the locals knew owned the land. An increasing number of formal titleholders resided in the local graveyard. The opportunistic behavior that bedevils market transactions also plagued land sales in Kenya. Sellers who had earlier pledged their land as collateral for a loan would fail to inform the buyer of this claim on the land. Banks found it politically difficult to auction off the collateral land after loan default, since land owned by kin of the defaulter surrounded it. Some sellers sold to several buyers at once, using different elders as witnesses. The adjudication committees required that sellers retain enough land for the subsistence of their own families.


pages: 976 words: 329,519

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

By mid-century there were more than two million people in Prussia and Mecklenburg earning a living either in part or in whole as farmhands; also by this time, 30 per cent of the agrarian population in Austria were wage-labourers; in Bohemia the proportion was 36 per cent. Many better-off peasants now found themselves in a position to purchase extra land or rent it from middle-class proprietors. The land owned by Russia’s peasants increased by a quarter from 1877 to 1905. Much of the increase was funded by a Peasant Land Bank set up by the state in 1882. Yet such a surge did not keep pace with population growth. By the end of the nineteenth century, nearly 40 per cent of landholdings in France consisted of less than 2.5 acres; in Denmark the proportion of holdings under 1.2 acres had reached 27 per cent, in Germany 33 per cent.

The Russian peasant uprisings of 1905–7 were brutally put down by the police and army, but led directly to government measures to defuse rural discontent in an attempt to restore order and stability after the unsuccessful revolution in the cities. These included the final cancellation of redemption payments, the freeing-up of the peasant land market to allow individual farmers greater flexibility in buying and selling land outside the commune, and the extension of the Peasant Land Bank. Encouraged by the leading minister Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin (1862–1911), a new class of substantial peasant farmers began to emerge in the following years, the famous kulaks later so reviled and persecuted under Stalin. But Stolypin’s intention of destroying the influence of the peasant commune was widely frustrated by peasant resistance, reflecting widespread attachment to collective methods of exploiting the land.


pages: 557 words: 159,434

Straight on Till Morning: The Life of Beryl Markham by Mary S. Lovell

Beryl Markham, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Etonian, land bank, out of africa

Monday nights there was always a terrific party. On Tuesday we would get all the supplies we needed to last until the next race meeting, and then we’d drive back to Naro Moru again – singing at the tops of our voices, because now we were glad to be going back. We lived in a different way up there. It was pure fantasy land. ‘Banks are robbers with a licence,’ Beryl used to grumble when she owed them thousands. By the mid 1960s she was running everything herself, for Jørgen had bought his own farm at Nanyuki in partnership with the Bathurst Normans’ son-in-law. She was hopeless at administration and budgeting and at times, despite her huge success, was so broke that Buster had to scratch around to pay the horses’ feed bills.


pages: 632 words: 159,454

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt by Kwasi Kwarteng

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, land bank, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, quantitative easing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, War on Poverty, Yom Kippur War

In trying to convince the French, Law praised the benefits to England and Holland of the banks of London and Amsterdam. He believed he could show that setting up ‘an establishment of a similar nature, but upon an improved plan in Paris’, would produce ‘the like good effects’ in France.16 The bank Law proposed would be secured on two types of assets. First, it would be a land bank, secured on the landed property of the whole kingdom. It would also be backed by the entire royal revenue. Law’s Banque Générale was duly established in May 1716. But the creation of the bank which would issue paper credit to the French monarchy was only one aspect of John Law’s financial plan. Soon afterwards, he began to ‘lay open the plan of the great and stupendous project he had long meditated’.


pages: 577 words: 149,554

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey by Michael Huemer

Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Phillip Zimbardo, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Stanford prison experiment, systematic bias, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, unbiased observer, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Plato (1974, 73, 403e) uses a similar phrase, where he has Glaucon state that ‘it would be absurd for the guardian to need a guardian.’ 41 317 U.S. 111 (1942). 42 See Carter v. Carter Coal Co., 298 U.S. 238 (1936); A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U. S. 495 (1935); Louisville Joint Stock Land Bank v. Radford, 295 U.S. 555 (1935). 43 See NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U. S. 1 (1937); West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937). 44 Harlan Stone, Hugo Black, Stanley Reed, Felix Frankfurter, William Douglas, Frank Murphy, James Byrnes, and Robert Jackson. The exception was Owen Roberts, a Hoover appointee.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

In some ways the federal government was pathetically weak: it hardly had any employees and was still unsure about its powers to tax or legislate. In one way, however, it was extraordinarily powerful: thanks to a succession of clever land purchases, it had some two billion acres of land at its disposal, a territory greater than any Western European nation. And it cleverly used this land bank to pay off its debts, modernize its infrastructure, and extend its empire westward. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160-acre plots of free land to anyone who could occupy and improve it (making the gift conditional on improvement was quintessentially American). Men who in the Old World might have hoped to acquire a 10- or 20-acre plot over many generations could get their hands on twenty times that by crossing the Atlantic and filing a claim.


pages: 444 words: 151,136

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism by William Baker, Addison Wiggin

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, lost cosmonauts, low interest rates, McMansion, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, naked short selling, negative equity, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, reserve currency, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, time value of money, too big to fail, Two Sigma, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra, young professional

Although the founding fathers had succeeded in creating a Constitutional hurdle against the outright printing of money by the states, by the early 19th century a new form of paper money production would take root: Fractional reserve lending. It would be particularly pernicious when associated with the government sanction of a central bank that would be supportive of heavy public spending for projects such as canal building or the purchase of frontier land. Bank Money and Public Works: From Boom to Bust Early in the nineteenth century the manufacture of money through leveraging multiple loans against a reserve of specie took hold in the new nation. “Bank money,” as it is sometimes called, rapidly exceeded specie reserves handily. Its growth, periodic overexpansion, and contraction 46 ENDLESS MONEY became the DNA encoding cyclicality to the economic corpus, but the use of silver and gold at the base provided restraint that would reign in moral hazard and provide a safe haven for savers.


pages: 497 words: 150,205

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

The supply of property is restricted by planning regulations that strictly limit where new housing can be built. Local authorities have little incentive to open up land for development because they don’t capture any of the increase in the value of the land. Building on a “green belt” around cities is especially tightly controlled. Big property developers with vast land banks also maximise their profits by limiting how many new properties they build each year – just as countries in the OPEC cartel maximise profits on their oil reserves by restricting how much they sell each year. This artificial scarcity drives up land prices, especially when combined with rising demand: for living space from a rising and (until recently) richer population made up of many more smaller households, together with speculative demand in anticipation of price increases.


pages: 665 words: 146,542

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power by Michel Aglietta

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, secular stagnation, seigniorage, shareholder value, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stochastic process, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, the scientific method, tontine, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus

This proposal met with heavy criticism, which confirmed the depth of the North–South rivalry. The bill that resolved to create the Bank was nonetheless adopted in 1791, under a twenty-year charter. Finally, through the Coinage Act of 1792, Congress anchored the dollar in a two-metal system.46 A non-provincial, non-land banking system had been put in place. What does this experience tell us about the formation of principles of sovereignty? This formation was evidently an evolutionary process, in which there were explicit contradictions, debated in structures which ultimately allowed for their overcoming. The collective that had emerged from the war was now transformed and institutionalised.


pages: 554 words: 168,114

Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century by Tom Bower

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, bonus culture, California energy crisis, corporate governance, credit crunch, energy security, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Global Witness, index fund, interest rate swap, John Deuss, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, land bank, LNG terminal, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, megaproject, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Oscar Wyatt, passive investing, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, price stability, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Alternative energy was not a substantial business for oilmen, casting doubt for some on the future of the industry. The sharp differences between the oil majors were rapidly disappearing. BP, van der Veer was pleased to see, was similarly modifying Browne’s commitment to the environment. Its plan to inject carbon dioxide into oil wells near Aberdeen had been abandoned, the land banks for wind farms in the US, China and India were being reassessed, and BP was buying a 50 percent stake of Husky Energy to develop a $5.5 billion project in Canadian tar sands over eight years. BP’s renewables headquarters in County Hall was closed, and the green commitment was effectively abandoned.


The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, business climate, colonial rule, death from overwork, declining real wages, deliberate practice, disinformation, European colonialism, friendly fire, Gini coefficient, guns versus butter model, income inequality, income per capita, land bank, land reform, land tenure, low interest rates, military-industrial complex, new economy, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, systematic bias, union organizing

Expenditures of the imperial court of the Shah are provided for in the Iranian state budget, which in 1976 gave the Shah, among other incidentals, a discretionary fund of $1 billion.76 The Shah’s personal assets are not published, but the Pahlavi Foundation controlled by the Shah owns property estimated as worth about $3 billion and direct family holdings of land, banks, insurance companies, hotels and industrial companies runs the family asset totals to unknown further large sums.77 Graft has long been endemic to the Shah’s Iran, and in the 1950s there was a major scandal involving allegations of massive looting of U.S. aid money by the Shah himself.78 The bribery revelations of recent years have pointed to the regular use of position by family and military insiders to “expedite” contracts, at a fee.


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

The fact that the clipped silver coins passed at face value even with a quarter to half their silver clipped away suggested the possibility that other things might be used for money. If money’s status as legal tender counted most, then it should be possible to find gold and silver substitutes. Writers began to tout various schemes to increase currency through paper issued by land banks. Economic Development in a New English Regime The year 1689 had brought Mary and her Dutch husband, William, to the throne of England, an event that precipitated the first of many wars with France. The animosities behind these wars had an economic impact, triggering a retreat from European trade and the raising of tariffs.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Stapleton’s replacement, the tented Denver International Airport (DIA), was the United States’ first greenfield hub in twenty years when it opened in 1995 and will likely be the last. It is perched on the high plains twenty-five miles northeast of downtown, a good twenty miles past Stapleton and seven times larger. With fifty square miles of land banked for future runways, terminals, and anything else it needs, DIA can float serenely behind its fences forever. Even if, in some perverse twist, the city spent another half century unfurling itself to its doorstep—and who would move a dozen miles past city limits just to butt heads again with an airport?


Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kondratiev cycle, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, law of one price, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, long and variable lags, low interest rates, market clearing, market friction, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, placebo effect, post-war consensus, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, value at risk, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-sum game

However the government obtained its 394 No t e s 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 finance, speculators bought up the confiscated property at rock-bottom prices, and the real income of everyone else suffered a catastrophic fall. Ricardo (2005 (1810)), p. 76. Ibid., p. 78. Ricardo (2005 (1817)), p. 364. See Asso and Leeson (2012). For the Bank’s assertion, see Kynaston (2017), p. 93. A forerunner of the real bills doctrine was put forward by the speculator John Law (1671–1729), loans from whose proposed land bank were to be collateralized on the ‘productivity of the soil’. Thornton (1802). Schumpeter (1954), p. 720. Thornton (1802), p. 287. Ibid. Select Committee on the High Price of Gold Bullion (1810), Abstract. Peel (1819), c. 680. Fisher (1922 (1911)), p. 241. Attwood, quoted in Wright and Harlow (1844), p. 383.


pages: 388 words: 211,314

Frommer's Washington State by Karl Samson

airport security, British Empire, California gold rush, centre right, company town, flying shuttle, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, land bank, machine readable, place-making, sustainable-tourism, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, transcontinental railway, white picket fence

A little farther south is Lime Kiln (& 360/902-8844; www.parks.wa.gov), the country’s first Point State Park whale-watching park and a great place to spot these gentle giants in summer. This latter park is open daily from 8am to dusk. Flanking the state park are Deadman Bay Nature Preserve and Lime Kiln Nature Preserve, two properties acquired for public use by the San Juan County Land Bank. Together the state park and the two preserves have more than 3 miles of hiking trails, making this the best hiking area on the island. As Westside Road moves inland, it becomes Bailer Hill Road. As you cross the island, watch for the picture-perfect Shepherd’s Croft, 2575 Bailer Hill Rd. (& 360/378-6372), a sheep farm set behind a white picket fence.


pages: 784 words: 229,648

O Jerusalem by Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre

back-to-the-land, British Empire, colonial rule, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, land bank, lateral thinking, Mount Scopus, union organizing

"The Jews who will it," it began, "shall have a state of their own." Two years later, Herzl formally launched his movement with the First World Zionist Congress in the gambling casino of Basle, Switzerland. The delegates to Herzl's congress elected an international Jewish executive to guide the movement, created a Jewish National Fund and a Land Bank to begin buying land in the area in which he hoped to create his state, Palestine. Then they picked two indispensable symbols of the state whose foremost claim to existence was in the fervor of their speeches, a flag and a national anthem. The flag was white and blue for the colors of the tallith, the shawl worn by Jews at prayer.


pages: 1,233 words: 239,800

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Steve Tiesdell, Taner Oc

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Arthur Eddington, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, City Beautiful movement, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, East Village, edge city, food miles, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, global supply chain, Guggenheim Bilbao, income inequality, invisible hand, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, land bank, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Masdar, Maslow's hierarchy, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-oil, precautionary principle, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Florida, Seaside, Florida, starchitect, streetcar suburb, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the market place, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Without these frictions to spatial mobility, it is likely that many fewer downtown business coalitions would have formed.’ Landowners own land prior to the commencement of development; during the development process the developer holds the land. With the exception of those holding land with the expectation of subsequently developing it (e.g. builders or developers with land banks), landowners do not normally take an active role in the development process and simply release land for development when offered a sufficient price. Their objectives are, thus, usually short-term and financial. Landowners (and developers holding land) influence the development process in four broad ways:• By releasing or not releasing land: Adams (1994) makes a distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ landowners.


EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book scanning, book value, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, global macro, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, pension reform, precautionary principle, premature optimization, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, working-age population, Yogi Berra

Now in a different role, he adopted a more soothing tone. In April 2007, as the subprime crisis heated up in the United States and questions about property valuations in Spain and elsewhere grew more insistent, Fernández Ordóñez maintained that property prices and the economy would glide down from their giddy heights to a “soft landing.” Banks, he said, had the financial cushions to absorb losses.129 In June, as further signs of distress in US mortgage markets emerged, he said that demand for homes would hold up in Spain, and extensive defaults on mortgages were unlikely.130 And in September, by which time financial markets were truly nervous, Fernández Ordóñez said: “Spanish lenders face this period of turbulence from a position of strength.”131 The banks, he again asserted, had built up large buffers during the good times precisely to help tide them over in such periods of stress.


pages: 1,009 words: 329,520

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. by William D. Cohan

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, Donald Trump, East Village, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, interest rate swap, intermodal, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Michael Milken, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short squeeze, SoftBank, stock buybacks, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, Yogi Berra

He knows you by reputation and Carr believes that at the appropriate point a meeting between you and Levitt should be arranged." Felix went on in the memo to muse about potential acquirers of Levitt, including large oil companies, because "they are already active in the real estate business...plus the fact that they have the cash resources required in any kind of a land banking operation," or "companies like Alcoa, Kaiser, or eventually, Georgia Pacific." Felix concluded, "In any case, I believe that, from everything I have been told, in its field Levitt & Sons is the number one company; its current business seems to be profitable and growing and if proper safeguards can be taken for retention of management it should be a saleable property.


From Peoples into Nations by John Connelly

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, oil shock, old-boy network, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, Transnistria, union organizing, upwardly mobile, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

The response of Polish society was cultural and economic self-defense: lending libraries with more than a thousand branches were established by 1890, from which parents could borrow books to teach their children the Polish language, history, and culture that were absent from the state schools; and Polish credit associations, land banks, agricultural circles, and trade unions were founded, through which Polish farmers and workers could pool savings, learn trades, and defend their interests. The repression of Polish culture reached its early heights during Bismarck’s Kulturkampf of the 1870s, but after that, it still remained onerous.


pages: 1,202 words: 424,886

Stigum's Money Market, 4E by Marcia Stigum, Anthony Crescenzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, flag carrier, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high net worth, implied volatility, income per capita, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, land bank, large denomination, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, paper trading, pension reform, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, tail risk, technology bubble, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

As for the federally related institutions, there are the Federal Home Loan Bank System, which lends to the nation’s savings and loan associations as well as regulates them; the Government National Mortgage Association, which funnels money into the mortgage market; Banks for Cooperatives, which make seasonal and term loans to farm cooperatives; Federal Land Banks, which give mortgages on farm properties; Federal Intermediate Credit Banks, which provide short-term financing for producers of crops and livestock; and a host of other agencies such as the Maritime Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Export-Import Bank of the United States.