Ann Pettifor. 1st March, 2009
Its been a hectic week. There was the Guardian’s debate on the Queen’s Question with Lord Skidelsky (author of the three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes) Vince Cable MP, Will Hutton and Larry Elliott, the Guardian’s economics editor. I wrote up a note on one aspect of my comments that evening, and will post it here separately, as it is hard to find on the Guardian’s site…
Then on Friday Nick Raynsford MP (Labour) David Willets MP (Conservative) and I debated on the BBC’s World Tonight whether we could expect house prices to rise again, once the economy recovers. I argued that it depended on whether we were willing to regulate credit-creation, as there is a direct correlation between rises in house prices and the de-regulation of credit by Edward Heath in 1971. In particular his Competition and Credit Control Act – widely dubbed the ‘all competition and no control’ credit act. David Willetts took umbrage at this, but it happens to be true. Indeed ‘easy money’ helped fuel the inflation in house and other asset prices….the inflation of the 1970s which is always blamed on Keynesianism, and never on the neo-liberal economists and their financial de-regulation…Its a bad old world.
And then I have posted another blog on Huffington Post, this time on ‘the dawdling’ of President Obama’s economic team. You can find it here.