Posted by Ann Pettifor

Today’s Budget and the crisis in Ukraine

ukrainian energy crisisThis year’s Budget takes place at a time of high international tension. The issue of energy security has once again shot to the top of the political agenda. The crisis in Ukraine demonstrates once again the extent to which Britain is exposed to political and economic risks beyond our control.

The fact is Britain’s dependency on external sources of energy means that we are dangerously exposed to this crisis – at a time when North Sea Oil and Gas production has fallen by over 20% since the Coalition government took office. Continue reading →

We can end the despotism of finance, at a price

justmoney-cover-v2-639x1024After the 2008 global financial crisis and panic, the international banking system very nearly collapsed. In the days after Lehman Brothers failed, panic prevailed. ATMs were on the very brink of denying punters access to their own money. A prominent international banker advised his wife to withdraw all their funds from the banking system.

To salvage the private banking system taxpayer-backed central banks intervened in ways that were (and remain) spectacular and historically unprecedented. Extraordinary monetary and other measures were and are still taken to bail out the finance sector’s big losers: reckless private bankers and financiers. Continue reading →

Money as a social construct and public good

Bitcoins“Everyone, except an economist, knows what ‘money’ means, and even an economist can describe it in the course of a chapter or so…”  – A.H. Quiggin

Right now many of us are transfixed by a new kind of digital money that seems to escape the control of central bankers: Bitcoin and its new market challenger, Litecoin. There are two striking things about the ‘money’ that is Bitcoin. First, its creators (computer programmers) have apparently ensured that there can never be no more than 21m coins in existence. Bitcoin therefore is like gold: its value lies in its scarcity. This potential shortage has added to the currency’s speculative allure, leading to a rise in its value. However, these rises and falls in value made it unreliable as a means of exchange. Continue reading →

Our monetary system is a great, if wildly misunderstood, public good

justmoney-coverBritain and Europe’s economic discourse is embarrassingly er…vulgar. Treasury and Finance ministers’ determination to paper over the role of big banks in the 2007-9 crisis, and instead use the opportunity to re-structure Europe’s welfare states, is both crass in economic terms, but also crude politics.

Politicians are influenced by what I call the kitchen table monetarism of Mrs Thatcher and by the views of Mrs Merkel’s “Swabian housewife”. These reinforce the primitive ideas about money once expounded by Mrs Thatcher, namely that:

The state has no source of money, other than the money people earn themselves….There is no such thing as public money. There is only taxpayers’ money.” Continue reading →

Mr Carney, you cannot fly to “Planet Croesus”

Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of EnglandOn the 24th October, 2013 Mark Carney, the new governor of the Bank of England, made a plea for the UK to reclaim its place “at the heart of a renewed globalisation. Such engagement would be timely” he said, “because globalisation itself is under siege.”

Mr Carney called for nothing less than that regulation of the banking system should be removed from oversight by the nationalised Bank of England, and instead should take place on what Peter Kellner recently called “Planet Croesus” – that place in the economic stratosphere occupied by global bankers and beyond the reach of accountable governments. Continue reading →