Lets not make any bones about it. Hank Paulson the US Treasury Secretary’s scheme announced yesterday represents a coup d’etat by the finance sector as Yves Smith rightly argues (21st September). The stakes are high. In a few months time we may have a Democrat President and a less compliant Congress. Right now, with the stock market gyrating and banks failing is as good a time as any for the finance sector to stage a coup d’etat.
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.
The World Service invited myself and Jim O’Neill, chief economist at Goldman Sachs on to the Business Daily programme today for what they hoped would be an intellectual punch-up. They were not disappointed. Prof. Jagdish Bhagwati had also been invited, but sadly was stuck in a traffic jam so unable to join us in the discussion, and instead was recorded separately…
O’Neill started by positively mocking the ‘peak oil thesis’. Ho, Ho, Ho… never heard anything so crazy he said… He had just read a book by a Californian – with no geological or economic background – calling for transition economies, and had never read such rubbish! “Don’t tell me you believe that peak oil nonsense!” I explained that I had grown up in a gold mining town, whose inhabitants and owners believed that gold would pay their wages and dividends for ever… Not so, mining there dried up in the mid 1990s and iIt turned out that reserves of gold, like oil, are finite. Today, my home town, Welkom in the Orange Free State, is a ghost town. When I asked him why Saudi oil production numbers seemed stuck, and would not budge even under intense pressure from the US, he looked incredulous.
A response to the "Triple Crunch" of financial crisis, climate change and oil depletion. Read the report published by the Green New Deal Group and nef (new economics foundation).
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 new economics foundation and director of Advocacy International.