By Ann Pettifor, Open Democracy, 11th December, 2007 On 9 August 2007, globalisation’s rickety financial levees were broken by a storm-surge of debt, invisible to most punters, but scary enough to frighten bankers. This debt includes highly leveraged corporate debt traded on secondary markets, household mortgages, credit-card debts, car loans and other substantial outlays. But […]
By Ann Pettifor, Open Democracy, 15th August, 2007 A single day, 9 August 2007, will go down in history as “debtonation day” – the beginning of the end of the deregulation and privatisation of finance that marks the era of globalisation. It is a moment that I (alongside many others) had long predicted, most notably
By Ann Pettifor, Ambrose Evans Pritchard, economics editor on the Daily Telegraph, is one of the few B ritish journalists to have a grasp of scale of the threat posed by the coming first world debt crisis. On the 26th June, he reported on the latest scandal to hit the US finance sector: the failure
Northern Rock, according to the FTs 28 June edition, ‘surprised the City yesterday by saying it had been caught out by the effect of higher funding (i.e. interest rate) costs…warning that profits would be below forecasts… ‘Adam Applegarth , chief executive said: ‘If anyone had forecast a 70 basis point increase in two-year swap rates
Why aren’t we all in Monte Carlo driving Ferraris? Read More »
19th July will mark ten years since the onset of the East Asian Financial Crisis. My most vivid memory of that crisis was attending the IMF’s annual meeting in Hong Kong in late September, 1997. I watched incredulously as a proposal by arrogant IMF officials to ignore democratic mandates, and economic common sense, and force
This morning, while drinking my cappuccino, caught a glimpse of a story in the Daily Mail – which claims that Eddie George, until not long ago governor of the Bank of England – admitted yesterday to a House of Commons Select Committee that the Bank had played a key role in fuelling the credit/housing bubble….but
Hold on to your assets, says Bob Ivry of Bloomberg (12 March 2007). The deepest housing decline in 16 years is about to get worse. As many as 1.5 million more Americans may lose their homes, another 100,000 people in housing-related industries could be fired, and an estimated 100 additional subprime mortgage companies that lend
In August 2006, when most financial commentators, banks and lenders were asleep at the wheel, I posted a piece on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site predicting that the fall in house sales in Florida and California were canaries in the deep vast coal mine of US credit – and that the impact of a
The nation state is dead, we are told. Boundaries no longer matter. Globalisation is triumphant, and we should all rejoice in a borderless world. Money, trade and information can flow, uninterrupted, from Japan’s capital markets via the ‘carry trade’ to South Africa’s capital markets, where quick and big bucks can be made on the interest
Bought the FT this morning; fear is lurking in the credit markets. There is now talk of pension funds buying into risky credit markets at just the point hedge funds have slyly slithered out of them; of companies – like California’s Fremont General Corp – dangerously exposed to the sub-prime lending market; and, because of
