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.
Five days after appearing before Congress to testify about its responsibility in one of the worst oil spills in US history, the Swiss company that owned and operated the oil rig that sunk into the Gulf of Mexico announced that it would shell out $1 billion in dividends to shareholders, ‘Raw Story’ reports.
……..To put the distribution in perspective, the amount of profit that Transocean plans to pay out in the next year is half of what Exxon ultimately paid for the Exxon Valdez disaster off the Alaska Coast.
t’s also more than double what BP has said they’ve spent on the cleanup to date.
Read more here: http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0517/spill-rig-owner-approves-1-billion-dividend-shareholders/
So Sir James Sassoon has joined the Eton boy, Osborne, and the Barclays banker, David Laws, at the Treasury, as Commercial Secretary – a post invented and designed for him. Sir James was vice chairman Investment Banking at UBS Warburg between1985-2002, where he specialised in privatisations.
The capture of the Treasury by the City of London is now complete.
The war on industry and the public sector can now begin in earnest.
Read post »
A banker appeared on Radio 4’s PM programme this evening at about 5.30 p.m and celebrated the new coalition’s plan to remove control over government spending from the newly-elected government.
He was referring I believe, to the proposal for a full spending review, by (he suggested) an ‘independent commission’ to report by the autumn, and to decide where cuts in spending will come.
He was I believe a senior economist with Credit Suisse, and said something along these lines: “the government has already handed control over interest rates (monetary policy) to the Bank of England. Now the proposal is to hand control over fiscal policy to a non-governmental body. That will give us, the markets, great confidence…..”
In their policy statement the Con-Dem alliance (hat tip to the Duke of URL) commit to “establishing an independent commission to review the long term affordability of public sector pensions, while protecting accrued rights.”
13 May, 2010
With a backdrop of bankers looting the EU’s Treasuries (via a bailout that rivals George Bush’s TARP) let us consider one of the most significant Dem-Con appointments (and a non-appointment) to the British cabinet
.
That of someone who until now was invisible: David Laws the new Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
His Wikipedia profile (updated on the day of his elevation, and before he had taken up his ministerial responsibilities) depicts him as the man that speaks for his party on matters relating to kiddie-winkies and families and, no doubt, motherhood and apple pie. He is also commended for his conciliatory role in negotiating the Scottish Parliament coalition.
No mention here of his real background.
For, according to ePolitix, David Laws was once Vice President of JP Morgan and Co and based in the United States, before becoming Managing Director of Barclays de Zoete Wedd in 1992.
Now, in my book the most obvious candidate for the job of Chancellor, or Chief Secretary to the Treasury, was surely Vince Cable, a man credited for his prescience in predicting the financial crisis, respected for his ongoing analysis of that crisis and regarded as a “scourge of City ‘fat cats’.” Read post »
10 May, 2010.
Does the Left in Britain have a future?
Michael Meacher MP has launched a new website – Left Futures - ‘to refresh Labour’s moribund grass roots’, and yours truly has posted there.
Meacher argues that ‘the current economic crisis’ presents the Left with an ‘intellectual opportunity’.
Let’s see if it turns out thus, or is just another load of hot air….
Watch this space…..
8th May, 2010.
My latest Huff Post blog
Britain’s political elites are doing deals this weekend, trying to form a government. Gingerly making their way across the shifting tectonic plates of public opinion; wary of being tripped up again by voters.
For, let’s face it, the British electorate are no fools.
As the governor of the Bank of England apparently warned last week, they are mad as hell. Austerity measures will not be tolerated, and will keep any governing party out of power for a generation .
So there is a lot to lose. Read post »
26th April, 2010
Dear readers….this is my latest Huffington Post.
“The humiliating surrender of Greece’s economic autonomy came just last Friday, 23 April, 2010. The democratically elected Prime Minister, George Papandreou transferred to unelected officials in Brussels and Washington the power to determine Greece’s fiscal policy. In other words, decisions about taxation, and how tax revenues should be spent.
In a 26 April interview with the
Financial Times on the island of Rhodes, the Prime Minister, George Papandreou admitted his country had accepted “a partial surrender of sovereignty”.
“Our struggle” he went on to say, “will be to recover our autonomy and liberate Greece from the surveillance imposed by the forces of conservatism”.
Back in 1765 Bostonians such as James Otis and Samuel Adams regarded “taxation without representation as a form of tyranny”.
Today, a nation that served as the cradle of western democracy will effectively be governed by remote, invisible and unaccountable officials. Read post »
6th April, 2010
I wrote the piece below for the Labour Party site Labour List but it got bumped across to Left Foot Forward. While waiting for its publication I did some superficial research on the use of the term ‘banksters’.
It is a term in wide use in the US, where it is associated with progressive political forces, and where the debate pits ‘Wall St’ against ‘Main St’, or ‘Wall St’ against ‘the little guy’ or ‘taxpayer’. See for example, this piece by the wonderful Rolling Stone writer on finance, Matt Taibi, and the associated cartoon.
Two Irish authors, David Murphy and Martin Devlin have written a book titled ‘Banksters – how a powerful elite squandered Ireland’s wealth’. So the Irish are not precious about the term.
But here in the UK the word is not widely used. Its use tends to be associated with the far right, and their anti-Semitism.
Which might explain British nervousness with the term. On the other hand our fastidiousness may just reflect the collusion of our various elites – political, media and otherwise – with the finance sector, and the excessive deference bestowed on bankers, sorry banksters.
Anyway, here follows the piece on how banksters are standing as parliamentary candidates for the Conservative Party.
Read post »
Welcome to my blog about the financial crisis. I'm Ann Pettifor, author and analyst of the global financial system, and co-author of the Green New Deal. I predicted an Anglo-American debt-deflationary crisis back in 2003, and am known for my work on sovereign debt and international finance, including Jubilee 2000. Currently a fellow of the