Prime, Policy Research in Macroeconomics

To understand why neoliberalism is in crisis, it helps to begin at the beginning with Adam Smith. He was the grandfather of market economics, but a more complex thinker than modern day neoliberals like to remember. They hail the ‘invisible hand’ – the idea that self-interest and unmanaged markets work best – and recall his...

PRIME (working with the New Weather Institute) organised an event at the TUC to commemorate the day - 9th August, 2007 - that inter-bank lending froze, central banks came to the rescue of private financial institutions, and the Global Financial Crisis began in earnest. We will be publishing transcripts and notes from that event, which was chaired by...

On 30th June 2016, just one week after the EU Referendum, I wrote this:It has swiftly become clear, if it were not already so, that neither the government nor the leaders of the Brexit campaigns had anything resembling a plan for what to do if the people voted in favour of leaving the EU.  As Mark Carney rather mordantly put it in his speech...

Photo, International Finance Place, Guangzhou, China, by Jeremy Smith Total global debt has increased, growth has been slowing down since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007 and has been rapidly decelerating after 2012. This may be a sign that the world has arrived at its debt carrying...

The Taylor “Review of Modern Working Practices”, published on Tuesday, is a fundamentally complacent document:“National labour markets have strengths and weaknesses and involve trade-offs between different goals but the British way is rightly seen internationally as largely successful.”True, the report expresses a number of reasonable aspirations and contains a number of sensible but gentle proposals, but it fails to come up with any strong proposals for dealing with the real...

Wagon of Fools by Hendrik Gerritsz Pot, 1637,  representing the Dutch Tulip Mania and the quest for riches... Image with acknowledgment to Wikipedia Recently, this author discussed the rapid increase in auto-finance delinquencies that need to be seen as just one component of a growing bubble. The...

Britain's public debt has risen inexorably since the Great Financial Crisis. It has done so despite (or because of) austerity, spending cuts that butchered the public sector and local government services, and led amongst other tragedies, to the Grenfell Tower inferno. And because of the very determined efforts of both Labour,...

The simple answer is yes, Britain can afford a significant pay rise for all five million public sector workers. This would be no more than a modest,  inflation-proofing rise - and yet the Conservative Prime Minister roundly rejected the call, and instead laughably raised the spectre of a Greek-style economic collapse! The...

What is the Single Market?Last week a cross-party group of MPs tabled an amendment to the Queen’s Speech calling on the government to commit to staying in the EU single market.  As a result of their support for the unsuccessful amendment, three Labour shadow cabinet members were forced to resign.The amendment revealed a possible confusion by its supporters about the nature of the single market and the European Union.  The wording of the amendment, which includes no reference...

The EU’s hugely complex banking resolution framework is generally supposed to have one key goal – to ensure that failing banks are ‘resolved’ without recourse to public bail-outs, thereby breaking the link between private banks and sovereigns…  The reality, we have seen today, is quite different – and, it seems, legal!  The EU can just about argue that technically, the rules have not been broken - but overall, the appearance is of a policy in logical disarray once again.After...