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This week I appeared on Newsnight with Gillian Tett of the FT and Louise Cooper of BGC Partners. We discussed our graphs of 2011 (see mine below) and wider questions around the global financial crisis this year – and how ecnomists and policy makers need to respond. Watch the show on iPlayer for the next 5 days here. Our discussion begins at 33 mins.  'Standard & Poor’s is just following events, not shaping them.' Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images This is a piece I wrote for the Guardian in response to the S&P threatened downgrade of the Eurozone’s ‘core’ economies. The Guardian wanted a maximum of 600 words, delivered in a short time, so this was written hurriedly, and in the back of taxis ferrying me to TV stations. For this reason I have made a few changes this morning: So European politicians want to shoot the messengers? Sure, ratings agencies haven’t always been reliable, decent or honest. And sure, like Eurozone politicians Standard & Poor is just following events, not shaping them. But on this occasion S&P’s analysis, if not their solution, is right. Credit Crunch 2.0 is fast accelerating and squeezing life out of the real economy. The global (not just Eurozone) banking system faces insolvency. This private financial crisis impacts disastrously on the real global economy, and incidentally on the Eurozone. But politicians – in the Eurozone and elsewhere – are not fixing the broken global banking system.  Image: acknowledgements to the BBC. The Autumn Statement reveals but one thing: the Chancellor and his advisers are both ill-advised and dangerously ill-prepared for the forthcoming prolonged Depression. (And if you think I exaggerate, let me remind you that 20 years after the Japanese debt bubble burst, Tokyo house prices are still falling, and the stock market is worth 60% less than 20 years ago. And the Japanese economy was in a healthier state then, than the UK is today, thanks to an export surplus.) Today’s penalising of the innocent – public sector workers, pensioners and those hundreds of thousands of young people entering the labour market - is a result of a deeply flawed economic analysis by the Chancellor of the causes of the global financial crisis.
George Osborne was presumably aiming at himself and his friends, when he vowed “to speak truth to power and wealth” at the Tory party conference this week, but dare he speak economic truth to the rest of us? – simultaneously published on Left Foot Forward > On the narrowest of bases, he might still claim he spoke “truth” to the weak and powerless when in the House of Commons debate on the economy on August 11th he made this challenge:
It was a ‘brave’ claim when he made it, and it’s looking even ‘braver’ – and more disingenuous – now. The following is the text of a speech to a joint meeting of the Christian Socialist Movement and the Co-op party on Tuesday 27th September, by Ann Pettifor, director of Policy Research in Macroeconomics (PRIME), co-author of “The Green New Deal” and a fellow of the new economics foundation. “I have just returned from a lecture tour of Australia where I came across the story of the Sydney Diocese and what the Aussies call the GFC – the Global Financial Crisis. The Sydney Diocese, far from chasing the money-lenders from the temple that is their faith, invited them in, borrowed money against the diocese’s collateral, and used the borrowed money to invest – some would say gamble – on the stock market. When the financial crisis broke in 2008, stock market losses were amplified by the church’s huge borrowings. Archbishop Dr. Peter F. Jensen broke the bad news while addressing the church’s annual Synod in 2010, and according to ABC, said that the synod’s “losses total more than $100 million.”
Published in the Guardian Cif alongside responses from Jonathon Freedland and Sheila Lawlor: Ed Balls said sorry for Labour’s record on ultra-light-touch financial regulation, and that must be acknowledged. But apologies are just not enough. He and Ed Miliband must stop attacking his electoral base, “hardworking families”, many of whom are trades unionists. As Balls recognises, unless urgent action is taken, this may be the gravest economic crisis in history – given the global integration of finance and the growth of world population. So Balls must go further. First, he must declare loudly and forcefully that Labour will never again be captive to neoliberal central bankers like Alan Greenspan; or private bankers like Sir Fred Goodwin of RSB. Simultaneously posted on the Huffington Post US > As mayhem breaks out on stock markets; as Eurozone banks freeze up; and as the global financial system approaches a frightening ‘danger zone,’ the champions of the globalised ‘free market’ and of the Euro are in search of a scapegoat. Instead of accepting that it is the broken banking system; the de-regulated financial Eurozone, and the deflationary monetarist policies of the Maastricht Treaty that are the roots of the crisis, the Troika (the IMF/EU/ECB) want to identify a convenient whipping boy. Instead of going after the real culprits — un-regulated bankers that lent recklessly, confident they would always be bailed out by taxpayers — the approach of the Troika is to scapegoat Greece. The implication is that the whole fabric of the Euro, and with it the global economy, is torn apart because one poor country, Greece, will not enforce ever-deeper austerity on her people. While I was in Australia I recorded this interview with ABC’s daily show. This went out on 15th September. Watch it above or on ABC’s website here >
Read about my speaking tour of Australia below – from the SEARCH Foundation: The SEARCH Foundation is currently touring eminent British economist and author Ann Ms Pettifor is visiting Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Brisbane for speaking “Before the Credit Crunch of 2008-2009 Brits and Americans were convinced that the good “Australians would be well advised not to fall into the same trap.
Wall Street plummeted as concerns over European debt and the US economic downturn spurred a broad sell-off. Photograph: Shen Hong/Xinhua Press/Corbis Read my article from Guardian Cif, Friday 19th August: As bank shares and stock markets plummet, and investors flock to the safety of government bonds; as obstinate EU leaders crucify their countries in a futile struggle to defend today’s equivalent of the gold standard; as British and American politicians adopt austerity policies and drive their economies closer to the cliffs of depression; and as most professional economists stand aloof from the escalating crisis – what lies ahead for ordinary punters like you and me? First, let’s take look at the big political picture. This crisis is already sharpening the divide between left and right in both the EU and the United States. Studying a precedent – the implosion of the 1920s credit bubble in 1929 – we note that four years after that crisis erupted, the political divide sharpened decisively. The United States and Britain moved to the left. Germany chose a different path. After 1930, Germany’s Centre party under Chancellor Brüning adopted austerity policies that resulted in cuts in welfare benefits and wages, while credit was tightened. At the same time the German government engaged in wildly excessive borrowing from the liberalised international capital markets. The ground was laid for the rise of fascism. |
In the September 2003 edition of openDemocracy I wrote: 
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