Ann is author of “Just Money: how society can break the despotic power of finance”, published by Commonwealth, 2014. The Financial Times is hosting a major debate on whether the private banking system should be allowed to continue creating 97% of the credit or money circulating within the economy. Martin Wolf, its respected economics commentator, supports […]
Posts under ‘Finance’
Why banks power to create money should be regulated and directed (but not ended)
Apr 27th, 2014 by Ann Pettifor.
Cable still doesn’t get the extent of corporate greed
Apr 25th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.Vince Cable, to give him credit, is the one member of the Cabinet who is seriously concerned about pay extremism in the boardroom. The rest are seriously in favour of it. But the measures he has so far put in place, albeit harried at every turn by the Tory Right, will achieve little. He has […]
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Asset-backed securities precipitated the crash: let’s do it again!
Apr 18th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.It is almost unbelievable, but true, that at the highest levels of today’s capitalism it is being proposed that the asset-backed securities which provoked the banking crash in the first place should now be relaunched as the best avenue for recovery. Both Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, and Carney, governor of the Bank […]
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Gideon’s promise of a Goldilocks recovery is pure fantasy
Apr 15th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.George Osborne preened himself – yet again – at the IMF conference 2 days ago that the Western economies are now set for a prosperous future, even as central banks steadily withdraw the lifeline that kept them afloat after the 2008 crash. Apparently normality is returning after the unfortunate blip five to six years ago. […]
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Innocent JSA recipients lose all benefit while guilty bankers bailed out by their new banks: what’s new in Tory Britain?
Mar 31st, 2014 by Michael Meacher.Next Thursday I have secured a debate on the floor of the House on the sanctioning of benefit recipients. The details about the sheer injustice of the practice, its inappropriate targeting and its devastating impacts, all of which are horrendous, I shall spell out in full, but I will also be making another comparison. Why […]
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Benneconomics – a tribute
Mar 24th, 2014 by Andrew Fisher.I got to know Tony Benn well when I worked as a researcher to the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs in the mid-2000s. I’d first met him when he was about to stand down from Parliament “to devote more time to politics“, a promise which he fulfilled. He filled venues around the country with […]
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Government’s own budget watchdog rips into Osborne
Mar 22nd, 2014 by Michael Meacher.If you read George Osborne’s budget speech in the Commons, and then read his own Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) analysis of it, it is like reading Fifty Shades of Grey and then turning to the Handbook of Morality and Sexual Ethics. They’re so much like chalk and cheese that it’s almost impossible to take […]
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What’s in the box, Gideon? Hand-outs for the rich and a phoney recovery
Mar 20th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.Osborne didn’t mention the most important fact about the budget. While the OBR’s growth forecast for this year has been raised to nearly 2.7% (though their previous four have each been grossly over-optimistic), they recognise that this ‘recovery’, such as it is, will fade after 2015. In other words, this is not a real recovery, […]
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The Banking Reform Act is rearranging the deck chairs on the neoliberal Titanic
Mar 6th, 2014 by Prem Sikka.Some six years after the banking crash, the UK has wheeled out its answer – the Banking Reform Act. Some deckchairs have been rearranged, but little attention has been paid to the key drivers of the crisis. The biggest financial crisis has coincided with the rise of neoliberalism, which emphasised faith in free markets and light-touch […]
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We can end the despotism of finance, at a price
Feb 25th, 2014 by Ann Pettifor.After 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 […]
