Ann Pettifor

Banking Crisis

Balance of Power: The Economic Consequences of the Peace at 100

My review of John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace  Macmillan (2019) appeared in Nature – the International Journal of Science – on 23 September, 2019. “Ann Pettifor finds astonishing contemporary resonance in John Maynard Keynes’s critique of globalization and inequity.” In December 1919, John Maynard Keynes published a blistering attack on the […]

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2007-9: Central bank coordination saved the finance sector, but not the world.

12 November, 2018 This year is the 150th anniversary of the TUC, and the 70th anniversary of the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD. As part of the celebration of these achievements, the TUC’s Economics and Social Affairs department organised an event “Lessons from the Great Financial Crisis” – on 12th November, 2018 –

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Yours truly at National Theatre discussion on The Lehman Trilogy

After attending a performance of the Lehman Trilogy, I was honoured to join a panel at the National Theatre on 16th October, 2018 to discuss the play. Readers will know that the play was directed by Sam Mendes, and starred three great actors in all of the complex parts: Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles. It was,

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The BBC’s Cassandras of the Crash

  On Wednesday, 19th September and again on 22nd September, the BBC broadcast an interview in which I participated. It was called Cassandras of the Crash. The programme is available on the BBC’s Radio 4 website, with the following introduction. “Ten years ago, in autumn 2008, the world watched as the biggest financial meltdown in

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Is It Unreasonable to Blame Bankers/Rentiers for the Rise in Populism?

At the April Rethinking Economicsconference in Oslo  I pointed out that western politicians and economists are repeating policy errors of the 1930s. The pattern of a global financial crash, followed by austerity in Europe and the UK, led in those years to the rise of populism, authoritarianism and ultimately fascism. The scale of economic and political

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China has exposed the fatal flaws in our liberal economic order

How can we make sense of volatile global stock markets? Economists explained this week’s dramatic falls by pinning responsibility on China. They are at pains to assure us this is not 2008 all over again. I beg to disagree. Even though data is not reliable, it appears that China is slowing down. By 2009, the

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Newsnight – economists discuss the ‘graphs of 2011’

This week I appeared on Newsnight with Gillian Tett of the FT and Louise Cooper of BGC Partners. We discussed our graphs of 2011 (see mine below) and wider questions around the global financial crisis this year – and how ecnomists and policy makers need to respond. Watch the show on iPlayer for the next

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Standard & Poor is right, ‘austerity’ has no economic clothes

This is a piece I wrote for the Guardian in response to the S&P threatened downgrade of the Eurozone’s ‘core’ economies. The Guardian wanted a maximum of 600 words, delivered in a short time, so this was written hurriedly, and in the back of taxis ferrying me to TV stations.  For this reason I have

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It’s not the public, but the private finance sector, stupid.

The Autumn Statement reveals but one thing: the Chancellor and his advisers are both ill-advised and dangerously ill-prepared for the forthcoming prolonged Depression. (And if you think I exaggerate, let me remind you that 20 years after the Japanese debt bubble burst, Tokyo house prices are still falling, and the stock market is worth 60% less

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