Prime, Policy Research in Macroeconomics

PRIME’s co-director Jeremy Smith and Progressive Economy Forum Council member John Weeks analyse the “bar room budget-brawl” between the Italian government and the European Commission, and argue that the Commission’s wrong-footed response threatens to strengthen the far right – to avoid opening the door to fascism, the EU must ditch its bias towards austerity.No one doubts that Italy’s economy is in a mess. It has been for a long time. It was not always so. From 1971 until...

The old View of the Treasury… Photo with acknowledgment to Social.shorthand.com “The Treasury building: a surprising history” This article was first published on the Progressive Economy Forum websiteAusterity has severely damaged Britain’s physical and social infrastructure. Coupled with a fall in real...

From earlier private debt crisis 10 years ago - President Bush welcomes then Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey to the G20 Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy, Nov. 15 2008, Washington D.C. White House photo by Chris Greenberg. This article first appeared in the Indian Journal the Economic...

Ten years on from the full explosion of the Great Financial Crisis in autumn 2008, and Brexit lurking just round the corner…  A lot of the Brexit arguments revolve around the perceived pros and cons of the EU’s Single Market; meanwhile, President Trump has been using force majeure to overturn aspects of the 1994 NAFTA deal. Given this conjuncture, I thought it would be instructive to take stock and assess, over a longer time-frame, how the UK and other developed economies have...

Debates in contemporary economics: origins, confusions and clarity This article was commissioned in August, 2018 by Prof. Abdul Azim Islahi, Chief Editor of the Journal of King Abdulaziz University: Islamic Economics. It was submitted for publication in October, 2018.  Minor amendments have since been made.  Introduction“Deficit financing” in contemporary economics is controversial – largely because of flawed economic approaches to a sovereign nation’s public finances. The...

The calls for a “People’s Vote” on the government’s proposed Brexit ‘deal’ (if indeed there is one) grow louder, but are especially contentious for the Labour Party, whose membership is more minded to “remain” than the public at large, which still seems fairly evenly split. But the call for a People’s Vote is not so straightforward, partly now in...

After the BRICs came the MINTs – Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey.In a series of January 2014 BBC programmes, Jim O’Neill – then the Goldman Sachs economist who had coined the term BRICs – celebrated the new acronym. On a blog under the title ‘The Mint countries: Next economic giants?’ he raved about the potential of his...

John Maynard Keynes - for the Times Literary Supplement It was his internationalism, together with his insights into the functioning of the world’s financial architecture that first drew me to the work of John Maynard Keynes.  His genius is, perhaps, most comparable to that of Charles Darwin. But whereas Darwin is widely recognized for developing the science of evolution, Keynes’s development of the science of macroeconomics goes largely unacknowledged by a profession still...

The BoE’s decision to raise the Bank Rate to 0.75% is a mistake. It is a mistake comparable to those made by Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve in the years between 2003 and 2006.  Mark Carney It is a mistake that must be understood in a wider context. Not just the political context – which promotes...

On 19th July, 2018, the director of Policy Research in Macroeconomics (PRIME), Ann Pettifor, received the following from Professor Antonia Grunenberg of the Heinrich Boll Foundation, Bremen, Germany. Berlin, July 19, 2018Dear Mrs. Pettifor,it is my great pleasure to inform you in behalf of the international jury of  the „Hannah Arendt Prize for...