Ellen Brown: (laughs)
Rob Kall: You're not
used to promoting these things!
Ellen Brown: (laughs)
Rob Kall: I'm
working hard to give you some promo time here. (laughs)
Ellen Brown:
Sorry. It's in San Rafael
California. We have a separate website
that's all about the conference, so it gives a whole breakdown of the speakers. And we have some money reformers speaking:
you know, the people that know all about money, and the fact that banks create
money, and how they do it. Then we have
more activist/networker-type speakers, and we have a computer programmer who
has a program that shows where you can actually model these different systems,
and show what the effect is. In other
words, that recent scandal about the whole economic model about scarcity is
wrong, because their model was wrong.
Rob Kall: Talk a
little bit about that. What happened
there? Opednews.com , which is the sponsor of this show, has a decent number of articles
about it, but give us a general explanation of what's the problem with these
researchers, and who's been using them to argue for their causes, and their
approaches, and -- give us an overview of it, please.
Ellen Brown: OK. I don't remember names so well; Rogoff
is one of the names of the original studies.
It was a Harvard study that showed that if your debt to GDP ratio is
higher than 90%, then it actually slows economic growth. Suddenly 90% became the big cutoff, and if we
dared to go over 90%, then we were jeopardizing our economy. That's been a big Republican reason for all
these austerity measures.
Like Paul Ryan: their platform, that we need to
cut back on all these services, including Social Security, of course, and
Medicare - things that have absolutely nothing to do with that, really, and
that are doing fine on their own - but anyway, their argument that we have to
cut back on everything (except, of course, military) in order to save our
economy comes from this piece of economic research. Well, a young researcher (29 years old, I
think) at University of Massachusetts tried to repeat their results, and he
couldn't do it. So he looked closely,
and saw that their figures were wrong, that some of their data was wrong; and
if you put the data in properly, Debt to GDP ratio really has nothing to do
with economic growth, and in fact /
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