Ann Pettifor

The Bankers’ Recession and the £200 billion bail-out

A Mr. David Smith in a letter to the Financial Times, (29 Aug 08) has suggested we brand this global recession ‘the bankers’ recession’.  He has my support and enthusiastic commitment to raising awareness of the brand.  Especially after today’s UK news.

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Ratcheting up the interest rate rack of torture.

In this big bad world of the Credit Crunch, powerful central bankers – civil servants all – have bent over backwards to help powerful and rich private bankers. On one day, ‘debtonation day’, central bankers in Europe and the US pumped an eye-watering $150 billion into the financial system, to keep big banks afloat. According

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What have Putin, Hu & Greenspan in common?

Have been listening to debates about the conflict in Georgia over the week-end. There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth about Putin’s disregard for democracy. In a similar vein, western commentary about President Hu Jintao’s Olympic Games is never complete without some tut-tutting about democracy and human rights in China. Yet these leaders

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Blaming the Victims

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

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A dust-up at the BBC’s World Service

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.

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