Ann Pettifor

Central Banks

Reclaiming Central Banks

  This article first appeared on the Project Syndicate website on 21st September, 2021 Fifty years ago, a US president closed the gold window, ended capital controls, and launched a new era of globalized finance. The “Nixon Shock” reshaped the international monetary system overnight, and then gradually changed the status of central bankers. Instead of acting as […]

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QE: How the World Got Hooked on Magicked-Up Money

Going cold turkey would finish off a dysfunctional global financial system that’s now hopelessly addicted to emergency infusions. The only solution is surgery on the system itself.The system, notionally governed by the invisible hand of the market, is no longer governed in any meaningful way: private excess puffs up bubbles that government indulgence ensures can never burst. We seem condemned to volatile commodity prices, wild capital flows, worsening imbalances in trade, taxation and income, and—before long—the next sovereign debt crisis.

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To restructure the British state, the international financial system must be transformed.

I contributed the following to a book – THE RETURN OF THE STATE –  published by the Progressive Economy Forum (PEF) and launched on 19 May, 2021.  The Covid-19 crisis has demonstrated one important truth. The international financial system is designed on terms that suit the owners of capital, not on terms that suit nation

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Billionaires & the pandemic: in happy alignment

There are two global forces positively thriving – despite today’s crises. They are the lethal coronavirus and the world’s billionaires – engaged in a form of ‘co-production’. Why are they thriving? And why do their interests align so happily? The ‘interests’ of a lethal virus are clear. The microbe’s supreme ambition is to spread as

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How to transfer power away from markets to democratically elected governments

This article was written in July, 2020 for Project Syndicate where it was finally published on 1st October, 2020. The global economy suffers from dangerous imbalances.  Economic goals for endless ‘growth’ lead to rises in heat-trapping gases that conflict with the earth’s limited capacity to manage rising toxic emissions.  Urbanisation, pollution, soil erosion, deforestation, depletion

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Here’s a three-step plan to take back control

This essay appeared in The Correspondent  on 17th April, 2020. The health of our domestic economies and the planet is tied to market forces that are largely invisible and little understood. As Covid-19 shakes the foundations of the world economy, rather than hope to restore it, let’s work to replace it. I was born and

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10 years after – and nothing has changed.

The following is an interview with Yena Yoon – a financial journalist with Chosen Ilbo “the largest newspaper in South Korea” conducted on 12 February, 2018, but still relevant.

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From Prospect Magazine: There Can Never Be A Market in Money

Prospect magazine’s April 14, 2018 edition ignited a debate between orthodox and heterodox economists. It also included a page titled:   In my contribution I tried to explain the nature of money. Not sure I succeeded. Anyway, here it is: “Unlike the prices of bitcoins or gold, the price of money is not determined by

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