Ann Pettifor

Rates: the BoE is not independent – it has a political mandate

Both the British Chancellor, Alastair Darling and the shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, have been on the radio this morning, resisting the idea that interest rates are political. Instead they have argued, vehemently, that the Bank of England is independent, and that the Bank must decide whether or not to lower interest rates.

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The Credit Crunch and the Green New Deal… in Compass

Wednesday 1st October, 2008 The massive deflation/de-leveraging of credit and debt that is now cascading through the banking system and rapidly deflating the value of housing and other assets in the Anglo-American economies will precipitate large-scale, global economic failure, for years to come. Read more…

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Bring back Keynes… in the Guardian

Tuesday 30th September, 2008. Anglo-American finance ministers and central bankers, like little Dutch boys, try desperately to plug leaks in the bursting dyke that is the international financial system. In the US, treasury secretary Hank Paulson hoped for $700bn to plug the gaping hole in Wall Street’s banks. In the UK, the government is not

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Bring back cool reasonable voice of Keynes… in the FT

Tuesday 30th September, 2008. Sir, Your editorial “In praise of free markets” (September 27/28) conflates regulation of trade markets with that of financial markets. This is a flawed analysis, one at the core of most economic orthodoxy – that money, like land, oil, soya beans, diamonds or gold, is a commodity, and therefore that trade

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Alan Greenspan’s audacity

Saturday, 27th September 2008. Lawmakers in the US struggle to come to terms with the scale of the financial crisis, the Paulson solution, and the role of government in resolving this crisis.  Republicans, particularly conflicted, sabotaged the $700 billion bail-out last Thursday.  At this moment Alan Greenspan proferrs advice from the lofty heights of the

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Interest rates, Keynes and the longevity of the rentier

The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, speaking on Radio 4’s flagship current affairs programme this morning, repeated something he says regularly: that ‘interest rates are low’ and that his government, through the Bank of England, kept them low. The question the BBC should have asked is this: if interest rates are low, and have been so,

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