The world is now faced by a terrifying prospect: large scale and systemic economic failure of a globalised, highly integrated economy, caused by the collapse of massive credit and asset bubbles. This credit bubble, created by the private, de-regulated or ‘liberalised’ finance sector, inflated other bubbles, notably in property, but also in dot.coms, stocks and …
Listen to Business Daily on the BBC World Service, live on Friday 8th August, 2008, 11.40am GMT, and via their website thereafter. The World Service invited myself and Jim O’Neill, chief economist at Goldman Sachs on to the Business Daily programme today for what they hoped would be an intellectual punch-up. They were not disappointed. …
Monday 21st July, 2008 Today sees the publication of a report – The Green New Deal – that I co-authored. Much of the analysis in these pages is reflected in the report. The Green New Deal highlights the fact that ‘easy money’ led to excessive consumption, which in turn led to the uprooting of forests …
Just released: The first report of the Green New Deal group Read More »
Fulfilling my duties as a citizen, I am now confined to the Southwark Crown Court as a juror, so have little time to update the blog. However the effective insolvency of two US government sponsored banks or enterprises (GSEs) – Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac – will now impact not just all those US individuals, …
Fannie and Freddie impact will be global, systemic Read More »
The Guardian, 12th July, 2008 In Ten tactics to brighten the gloom, the Guardian invited ten experts to give advice to the Chancellor and Prime Minister on how to lift the economic gloom – and to do it in just 100 words. Other contributors included Howard Davies, Robert Peston, Irwin Stelzer and Bill Emmot. Here …
Open Democracy, 7th July, 2008. The precedent of the United States’s great depression and Japan’s post-bubble collapse should haunt today’s G8 summiteers, writes Ann Pettifor in Open Democracy. Japan hosts the G8 summit in the northern island of Hokkaido on 7-9 July 2008 at a time when its prolonged period of deflation and economic failure …
The G8 and Bankers: Lessons from the 20s and 80s Read More »
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be …
I’ve dubbed the 9th August, 2007 ‘debtonation day’ – because on that day banks froze lending to each other, central banks panicked and began providing ‘liquidity’ – i.e. new loans to banks in trouble – and the Credit Crunch took hold. By strange coincidence, it was on the 9th August (see Charles Kindleberger in ‘The …
The Commentariat are spooking themselves themselves with ‘frightmares’ about the “spectre of inflation”. The charge is led by the BBC’s economics team with Hugh Pym warning in his News At 10 report (17th June) that inflation was “haunting the economy….” . Tonight Michael Crick of Newsnight piled on the horror by flashing images of the …
Sacrificing the economy on the cross of inflation Read More »
Listen to Ann respond to Alistair Darling’s speech at Mansion House tonight, 18th June, 2008, on Radio Four, 10pm (93.5FM).
