Ann Pettifor on BBC Radio 4: Return of Bretton Woods?
The World Tonight, Monday 14th October, 2008, 10.38pm. Listen here
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Credit Crunch
Iceland, debt and Laxness, the Nobel Prize Winner
12th October, 2008. The news that Britain’s local authorities may have lost up to a £1 billion in the collapse of Iceland’s banks beggars belief. The competence of their highly paid chief executives must surely be challenged, and powers to borrow on international capital markets curtailed.
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Chasing the money-changers from the temple
11th October, 2008 The sin of usury, diluted by Eck and the Fuggers banking family in the 1500s, ceased to be condemned as a sin after John Calvin (pictured) gave a license to the charging of interest. Usury as a sin should be brought back now, I argue in the columns of the Guardian today. Read the
Blinded by Dogma… in the UK Guardian
9th October, 2008. Central banks’ obsession with inflation is stopping them from tackling a far more pressing threat. Read more here…
Rates: the BoE is not independent – it has a political mandate
Both the British Chancellor, Alastair Darling and the shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, have been on the radio this morning, resisting the idea that interest rates are political. Instead they have argued, vehemently, that the Bank of England is independent, and that the Bank must decide whether or not to lower interest rates.
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The Credit Crunch and the Green New Deal… in Compass
Wednesday 1st October, 2008 The massive deflation/de-leveraging of credit and debt that is now cascading through the banking system and rapidly deflating the value of housing and other assets in the Anglo-American economies will precipitate large-scale, global economic failure, for years to come. Read more…
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Interest rates, Keynes and the longevity of the rentier
The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, speaking on Radio 4’s flagship current affairs programme this morning, repeated something he says regularly: that ‘interest rates are low’ and that his government, through the Bank of England, kept them low. The question the BBC should have asked is this: if interest rates are low, and have been so,
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Rip it up and start again
19th September, 2008: My comment for the Guardian’s site, part of a debate on the Credit Crunch organised by the new economics foundation, of which I am a fellow… Bankers have gone to great lengths to damage our confidence in the banking sector. And loss of confidence and trust on this scale can’t be fixed
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
Ratcheting up the interest rate rack of torture. Read More »