Posted by Ann Pettifor

Numb and number: where the Big Short falls short

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Christian Bale as perspicacious hedge-fund manager Michael Barry in The Big Short

As this goes to press, global capital markets appear to be stabilizing after another period of intense, and scary stock market volatility. This set the context for the arrival in Britain of Adam McKay’s The Big Short – a film about the American sub-prime mortgage meltdown, based on the book by Michael Lewis.

It could be argued that the movie is late, and even outdated. But it is not in fact. It ends with the systemic failure of the system in 2007-9 – a crisis that has not gone away. On the contrary, it has rolled around from the US sub-prime housing market and Wall St. and on to the Eurozone, where Greece, Cyprus and Portugal were at the eye of the storm. Today financial volatility is centered on ‘emerging’ markets and in particular, China, and has unnerved financial markets around the globe. Continue reading →

Thatcher: should we pay out all that money for Trident?

Trident II missile (US Defense Dept)There is a fascinating review by David Runciman in the LRB of Charles Moore’s: Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography, Volume ll Everything She Wants. In it Runciman recites the tale of Mrs T, the Labour leader Neil Kinnock’s support for nuclear disarmament, and President Reagan’s sudden conversion (in 1986) to nuclear disarmament. It turns out that at a meeting in Reykjavik in the autumn of 1986 Reagan and President Gorbachev, backed by George Shultz Reagan’s Secretary of State, agreed to eliminate nuclear weapons. The implications of this sudden meeting of minds were… ‘cosmic’ writes Runciman.

Mrs Thatcher was not happy. Suddenly the Labour Party’s position on nuclear disarmament appeared credible…”in line with the unfolding logic of superpower politics and….(where) the Tories would be the ones out on a limb.” So Mrs Thatcher began to work to change Reagan’s mind, and “bring him back into line.” Continue reading →

On brilliant, neglected women economists

joan robinsonThis week I was invited on to Woman’s Hour to talk about outstanding women in economics that have never properly been recognized and acclaimed for their contributions. The context is the Virago/New Statesman women’s prize for new, young writing on politics and economics. The prize was launched in late October to address the underrepresentation of women in non-fiction publishing  “and most particularly in the vital, society-shaping fields of economics and politics”.

At first, the producer of Woman’s Hour (Helen Fitzhenry) had asked if I wished to put forward a list of women economists and writers. I did so with alacrity. At the top was Emeritus Professor Victoria Chick, a formidable and outstanding monetary theorist and macroeconomist. She is best known for the integrity and rigour with which she evaluated both Keynesian and monetarist traditions in her book, The Theory of Monetary Policy (1973). And for her magnum opus: Macroeconomics after Keynes, published in 1983. (Listen to her here on the subject of “why economists don’t understand money.”) Continue reading →

Is capitalism “mutating” into an infotech utopia?

9781846147388I was privileged to be invited by the St. Paul’s Institute to discuss (on the 3 November) the thesis in Paul Mason’s recent book Post Capitalism: A Guide to Our Future with a keynote speech from the author.

Mason’s book is both a riveting and intellectually exhilarating read. It challenged me at a range of levels, and has added considerably to my list of must-read books. However, I have strong disagreements with Mason, and these are outlined in my review, published as a PRIME e-publication. Continue reading →

Meacher was scholarly, considerate and magnificently right on the big issues

MeacherMichael Meacher has died as he lived, seldom attracting any fuss or attention, and seldom burdening his friends and comrades. That makes me sad, as he was a man deserving of attention – and not just as he was dying.

He was marginalised for most of his political life, often by the same people that will today mourn him. And that disregard for, and dismissal, of his unerringly principled political stance was wrong – both in political and moral terms – because Michael Meacher was magnificently right on the key democratic, economic and environmental issues of the day. Continue reading →