Ann Pettifor

Federal Reserve

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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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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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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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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Interview with New Zealand’s Biggest Business Website – STUFF

On the 15th April, this year, I visited New Zealand at the invitation of the Institute of Directors, to address 600 CEOs at their annual meeting. This is an interview given to the journalist Rob Stock in which he asked about the possibility of another financial crisis. “Ann Pettifor predicted the global financial crisis, and

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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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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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No way to run an economy

Ann Pettifor: September 24, 2009 As world leaders meet in Pittsburgh and then Istanbul (for the World Bank and IMF meetings) expect much self-congratulation and back-slapping for having got the world through the post-Lehman crisis. But behind the cacophony of self-praise, watch out for three alarms flashing red: The escalating foreclosure and rising mortgage delinquency

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