January 9th, 2009
Ann Pettifor: 9th January, 2009, 17.00PM
Simon Jenkins writes for the UK Guardian, and has a splenetic piece in the paper today. Its an attack on the economics profession which “has collapsed in ignominy and if there were any justice the profession would be sacked en masse”. Could not agree more. But he also has a pop at bishops. “The Church of England” he writes “feels we had it coming to us, though it unfortunately omitted to warn us beforehand.” That’s not true, nor is it fair. The then Bishop of Worcester, Peter Selby wrote a powerful and insightful book in the early 1990s, titled “Grace and Mortgage” in which he both condemned the ‘hegemony of the finance system’ and warned it would end in crisis. And he was not alone.
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December 4th, 2008
 4th December 2008
‘Financial writers’ and establishment economists seem to live in a different world. They often bring to mind bats, hanging upside down in the cavernous, soaring rafters of a barn, analysing the world from a great distance, and upside-down. Take one Diana Henriques – described as a ‘senior financial writer for the New York Times‘. She was on the Rachel Maddow Show on US TV last night, reviewing the gargantuan $700 billion bail-out of US banks. In defence of the opaque and unaccountable activities of the Treasury team dishing out taxpayer largesse she said this: “No-one could lay out a war-game for this (crisis) in advance”. (Ehem, correction: some were well prepared, and could have.) But it was the next remark that took my breath away:
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November 6th, 2008
 Speigel Online: 5th November 2008
My hope is that the next US president will help build a new, more just, stable and sustainable global financial architecture, vital for balance and stability in the world economy, but also for the eco-system…
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October 30th, 2008
 Open Democracy: 27th October 2008
It is a small measure of the dramatic financial meltdown of 2007-08 that leading representatives of western liberal capitalism ransacked the past for reference-points to convey its scale…
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October 28th, 2008
In my contribution to the Green New Deal in July, 2008 I warned that corporate debt defaults were the next “big shoe to fall”. We are all aware of the devastating consequences of defaults by sub-prime borrowers. However their debts are miniscule compared to outstanding corporate debts. Now, I firmly predict,corporate debt defaults are about to cascade down on the global economy, leading to devastating impacts, not the least of which will be widespread unemployment. How can I be so sure?
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October 27th, 2008
I wrote a piece on Keynes and monetary policy for the Standard, which appeared on Thursday, 23rd October, 2008. You can read it below. Today a group of monetarist economists , supported by a range of bankers, have written to the Telegraph objecting to a public works programme to help economic recovery. They are right that excessive liabilities on the government’s balance sheet could cause interest rates to rise, but government spending has a multiplier effect, and very quickly pays for itself. They seem unaware of this economic fact. There is some overlap between our views on monetary policy as an effective tool, but I disagree with their view that UK government spending has been excessive.
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October 25th, 2008
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 published.
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October 21st, 2008
 21st October, 2008
A new Bretton Woods: To save economies and the planet, we must tame markets,upsize the state, and downsize the global single market. This piece is derived loosely from the book I edited at the new economics foundation “Real World Economic Outlook” (Palgrave, 2006). The proposal for an International Clearing Agency draws on John Maynard Keynes’ proposal for an International Clearing Union, but also on additional insights by Jane D’Arista of the Financial Markets Center in the US.
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October 14th, 2008
 The World Tonight, Monday 14th October, 2008, 10.38pm.
Listen here
October 10th, 2008
 9th October, 2008.
Central banks’ obsession with inflation is stopping them from tackling a far more pressing threat.
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In the September 2003 edition of openDemocracy I wrote:
Click here to read the full story in openDemocracy
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