My friend the formidable economist, Mark Weisbrot put it most succinctly. “Since the U.S. economy showed positive growth for the last quarter, some commentators in the business press are saying that we are not necessarily going to have a recession, or that if there is one it will be mild. This is a bit like […]
Few people understand how one of the most important levers in a debt-laden economy – interest rates – are set. Many believe that the rate is simply a result of supply and demand – the supply of savings and demand for those savings. Not true. In fact in Anglo-American economies savings have precious little to
The Guardian reports today that one of Tony Blair’s key allies, Phil Collins, has bravely attacked Labour’s weakened leader. Collins singles out Old Labour’s ‘faith in the ‘benign’ power of the central state’ and suggests that Ed Balls’ policies for children will set the party on a path to tragedy. When the most ardent of
The Economist’s latest supplement (15 May 2008) on ‘modern finance under attack’ dubs the finance sector’s critics ‘Barbarians at the vault’. The magazine’s leader writers are confident of their analysis and unequivocal: “Bubbles, excess and calamity are part of the package of Western finance. And still it is worth it.” In the same issue writers
The FT reported last Tuesday that ‘bugs’ in the computer model used by Moody’s the rating agency, were responsible for over-valuing certain ‘assets’ – actually parcels of debt. The foolish computer, which should have known better, rated these debt packages as AAA – i.e as safe as houses, certain to be repaid, and therefore without
by Ann Pettifor, 22nd May, 2008. There has been much huffing and puffing in the financial media about Horst Kohler’s comments that financial markets have become “a monster” that must “be put back in its place”. The German president who was MD of the IMF from 2000-2004, compared bankers with alchemists who were responsible for
By Jo Jamison, 20th May 2008. One in eleven people in the UK are in debt or arrears (that is separate from their mortgage) but for people with mental health problems, this figure rises to one in four says the Mind Campaign launched on 10th May, 2008. Worryingly, the research also found that banks are
Debt and mental health: Mind launch new campaign Read More »
By Ann Pettifor, Open Democracy, 11th December, 2007 On 9 August 2007, globalisation’s rickety financial levees were broken by a storm-surge of debt, invisible to most punters, but scary enough to frighten bankers. This debt includes highly leveraged corporate debt traded on secondary markets, household mortgages, credit-card debts, car loans and other substantial outlays. But
By Ann Pettifor, Open Democracy, 15th August, 2007 A single day, 9 August 2007, will go down in history as “debtonation day” – the beginning of the end of the deregulation and privatisation of finance that marks the era of globalisation. It is a moment that I (alongside many others) had long predicted, most notably
By Ann Pettifor, Ambrose Evans Pritchard, economics editor on the Daily Telegraph, is one of the few B ritish journalists to have a grasp of scale of the threat posed by the coming first world debt crisis. On the 26th June, he reported on the latest scandal to hit the US finance sector: the failure
