The depression was caused by fiscal measures. Money is a symptom, it's not the disease.

If surplus rents from privileged property rights are captured for the common wealth by taxes then there won't be asset bubbles will there?

The cause of retail and asset price inflation is by definition and accounting identity rent-seeking - ie the demand for profit/rent in excess of cost.

Retail price inflation is everywhere and always a fiscal phenomenon: asset-price inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon. Of course, when consumables become assets - as now - we get problems.

This deficit-based banking system is fucked: permanently and irretrievably, and the reason is the systemic imbalance in purchasing power and ownership of productive assets, particularly land.

Only fiscal measures will do, and they will not happen within our perverted 'representative democracy'.

Banks are evolving rapidly into a role as service providers for the simple reason that such risk service provision is capital lite.

By outsourcing market risk, but not credit risk, they facilitated the existing bubbles in equity, commodity and energy markets. When these collapse, we'll see a move to the next adjacent possible.

As regards the fiscal measures necessary to resolve debt and to transition to a low carbon economy, the  Public sector power-seekers (as opposed to private sector rent-seekers) in charge of government-as-intermediary have not only seen the steering wheel come off in their hands: they are handing it to the equally powerless front seat passenger.

This book on the End of the Market makes an interesting case that we have seen the end of 'market clearing', but in my view we have seen only the end of a market architectural paradigm.

I think we saw in late 2008 the end of the intermediated market, and that we will see an evolution via a dis-intermediated 'Energy Economy' market possibly one day to a Gift Economy/Economy of Abundance.

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson