23rd June 2010

Last night I joined Riz Khan on his Al Jazeera evening show to discuss the budget and the dangers of synchronised austerity. Watch the video below:

23rd June 2010

Today I gave my verdict on the budget in the Guardian. Click here to see it on the guardian site or read my article below:

“When a small Canadian cruise ship hit an iceberg in 2007, its 154 passengers were nonchalant. Initial reports suggested only a small hole was punched into the hull and so they refused to panic. Twenty hours later the ship “had sunk beneath the waves”.

Today the public and particularly the Liberal Democrats appear nonchalant as George Osborne steers the ship of state straight towards the Austerity Iceberg. The foolhardy captain of this ship has recruited the most vulnerable sectors of society – children, mothers and the elderly – to act as his crew – while removing their life boats.

Read post »

22nd June 2010

Last week I was invited to speak at the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin on Europe’s sovereign debt crisis. Watch the video below >

7th June 2010

My latest Huff Post blog

It’s not often that you get to sit in the same room with a group of world leaders and hear their wisdom, ideas and experiences at the personal and political levels.

I’ve just enjoyed that privilege. And the world leaders were all women.

The occasion is a conference of thousands of women in Washington DC. ‘Women Deliver’ is convened by a great New Yorker and long-time advocate for women’s reproductive rights, Jill Sheffield. Its purpose is to transform the life chances of girls and women around the world.

Read post »

6th June, 2010.

I am privileged to have as a mentor Professor Victoria Chick, Emeritus Professor of Economics at University College, London. Prof. Chick is both an eminent and distinguished Keynesian, but also a fine teacher and a woman of great taste and sensibility. She bears an uncanny resemblance to Virginia Woolf, and has reached the top of a very male-dominated profession, although her work has not always been fully appreciated by neo-liberal colleagues.

Anyway, she and I have become alarmed by the overwhelming political consensus, parroted each day by the BBC’s economic correspondents, that  ’balancing the budget’ and ’slashing the deficit’ must now become a national priority.   We are particularly alarmed because this analysis, based as it is on micro-economic reasoning, has dire macro-economic consequences. These consequences appear  not to be understood by EU and US politicians and policy-makers at the OECD, the ECB and  IMF.  As a result the world now faces the terrifying prospect of globally synchronised austerity.

As my readers know, I have long argued that Britain needs to ’spend away the debt’, and in earlier posts have demonstrated the consequences of the 1945 Labour government’s post-war spending: namely, a steady reduction in government debt. Prof. Chick and I  have been digging deeper into the numbers, and have produced the attached paper on the evidence that fiscal consolidation increases, rather than ’slashes’ the debt.  It is a more academic document than my readers will be used to, but riveting all the same.

Click here to download the PDF.