Ann Pettifor

Anglo-American Financial Crisis

Knowles needs to listen more carefully to ‘hero’ Clinton on deficit reduction

The austerity brigade is rattled. Young Daniel Knowles over at the Daily Telegraph is so worried, he has had to rise to the defence of the Treasury and Office for Budget Responsibility – and then resorts to proposing Greece’s economic strategy for the UK. Why? Because orthodox economic ideology has been challenged by none other than Daniel’s […]

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Why I did not sign the Observer letter for ‘Plan B’

I thought long and hard before refusing to sign the letter calling for a Plan B. Not because I do not think it is urgently required. But because the letter called for “clamping down on tax avoidance and evasion, as well as by raising taxes on those best able to pay.” It goes without saying,

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Crisis? What crisis?

Apropos the last post: we dissidents are not alone. Have belatedly come across David Malone’s  excellent post (written earlier but somehow missed by me) on the same theme –  the airbrushing of the financial crisis from all political discourse. David goes further and highlights the implications for democracy and the rule of law.  I hope

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Coming soon: another global financial crash? Capital mobility and the commodity mania

Tin produced at a Glencore plant in Vinto, Bolivia “Experience shows that when policies falter in managing capital flows, there is no limit to the damage that international finance can inflict on an economy.” Yilmaz Akyüz, “Capital Flows to Developing Countries in a Historical Perspective: Will the current Boom End with a Bust?” Today, as

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‘Debtonation’ – why it’s still relevant

Welcome readers, to my newly refreshed blog, and thanks to Georgia Lee and Maz Kessler for making it look so good, and work so well. I had thought that the title needed refreshing too. After all, I am fond of defining 9th August, 2007 as ‘debtonation day’, and that is now long past. To refresh

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Is George Osborne a radical Chancellor? – far from it

I was on Newsnight last week, to comment on the Budget. (You can watch it with the BBC’s iPlayer..our slot is about 35 minutes into the show.) Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman posed a question to the panel, which included Lord Lamont, ex-Chancellor, and Irwin Steltzer. He asked: is George Osborne a radical Chancellor?” Radical, according to the dictionary definition

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Obama (and Congress) can’t cut the budget deficit

The terrific hoo-ha around the US Budget Deficit is just that: hot air – predicated on the fallacy that President Obama and an ideologically-driven Republican Congress can cut the deficit. They can’t. It’s a delusion that arises because economists insist on applying microeconomic reasoning to macroeconomic conditions. It’s a delusion that leads to broader misunderstanding

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Update: bankers complete capture of UK Treasury – & attack Cable

So Sir James Sassoon has joined the Eton boy, Osborne, and the Barclays banker, David Laws, at the Treasury, as Commercial Secretary – a post invented and designed for him.  Sir James was vice chairman Investment Banking at UBS Warburg between1985-2002, where he specialised in privatisations.  The capture of the Treasury by the City of

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A tale of two presidents

5th January, 2010 Sorry about the delay in posting, but this is my latest blog for the Huffington Post. “One is president of a country of about 300,000 people — Iceland — a country about the size of Virginia, President Olafur R. Grimsson. The second is president of a country of about 300,000,000 people, the

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