Ann Pettifor

Financial Crisis

A debt spiral we could have avoided

24th October, 2008 The NS has published a short piece this week: “Economists simply would not accept that their model could fail“.  An introductory sentence is not mine: “Who would have predicted..that prudent Gordon Brown (would)  breach the EU cap on government spending?” Am writing to the NS to ask for a correction to be […]

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Central Bankers Add to the Economic Malaise…

22nd October, 2008. I am dictating this piece down the phone from Budapest in Hungary where I have just arrived to deliver a lecture to the Ybl Club. My hosts were in a state of shock on arrival because the central bank of Hungary has just raised interest rates from 8.5% to 11.5%…

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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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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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Bring back Keynes… in the Guardian

Tuesday 30th September, 2008. Anglo-American finance ministers and central bankers, like little Dutch boys, try desperately to plug leaks in the bursting dyke that is the international financial system. In the US, treasury secretary Hank Paulson hoped for $700bn to plug the gaping hole in Wall Street’s banks. In the UK, the government is not

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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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Where, oh where, are the orthodox economists now?

20th September, 2008 In the midst of all this tragedy and chaos, one has to savour the moment.  The sight of all those free-market capitalists, trained by economists at the Chicago School of neo-liberalism,  handing over to ‘big government’ the financial system of the biggest free market economy in the world.

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Comrade Paulson, nationalised banks & socialism for the rich.

You have to admire the spin.  The US Treasury Secretary, Comrade Hank Paulson, pictured here, announced  today, Sunday 7th September, 2008  that the US government is natonalising two huge US banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Which means in effect that Comrade Paulson is  socialising the losses of the shareholders and investors in these banks

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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 »