Tag Archives: Article

“Financial Assets = Liabilities.” It’s one of the great accounting-identity truisms of economic understanding — both among traditional, mainstream economists, and even (especially) among many heterodox, “accounting based” practitioners. It seems obvious: When a company issues and sells bonds, it posts a liability to its balance sheet; the bond buyers hold financial assets on theirs.[1] The problem is, that truism isn’t even close to true. The most obvious example is corporate...

Late last month, pioneering socialist economist John Weeks passed away. Ann Pettifor remembers her colleague and friend – and his contributions to left-wing politics. This piece first appeared in Tribune magazine on 08 August, 2020. Please note correction at the end of this piece. John Weeks, brilliant Left economist and public intellectual, would have been well pleased that three days after his death the Financial Times published a letter he had signed attacking the Office for Budget...

  This review of books to inspire a green transformation appeared in The Guardian on 18 July, 2020. Everyday life has been upended by the pandemic, but the Arctic heatwave is a reminder that the climate crisis still poses an urgent threat to humanity. We will need resolve, ambition and optimism as we emerge from lockdown, so we can forge the green recovery that is so crucial. One book that has sustained my faith in the future is Herman E Daly and John B Cobb’s hopeful vision, For the Common...

The following debate between Paul Wallace and Ann Pettifor appeared in Prospect magazine on 10 July, 2020. Is our capitalist economy an unparalleled engine of prosperity, or a human and ecological disaster? Two contributors debate whether the system is worth saving Yes—Paul Wallace It is tempting, when living through a once-in-a-century event such as the coronavirus pandemic, to say everything must change: that it’s time to tear up the rulebook and to create a completely new kind of economy....

This article appeared in a special, June 2020 edition of the Real-World Economics Review that majored on The Inequality Crisis. Today as the world endures the crisis of a global pandemic, “an old order is ending in convulsions”. So writes Rebecca Spang, historian of the French revolution in The Atlantic (Spang, 2020). In the 1790s, money, debt and the non-payment of taxes by France’s rentiers, played a critical role in revolutionizing France. Today purveyors of money and debt – creditors,...

This article appeared in the UK-based Church Times on 26 June, 2020 The coronavirus pandemic is a moment of reckoning for globalisation and our international financial system. The pandemic has shown how unjust the international system is towards low income countries; given us the opportunity to imagine another economy; and served as a warning.  If we do not fix the system to prepare for the coming, graver crisis of earth systems breakdown, the survival of humanity is at risk. Just as it was...

The following appeared in Nature magazine on 17 June, 2020 Economic researchers neglect the role of financialization in global existential crises. Riddled with comorbidities, the current global monetary and financial set-up precipitates crises with increasing frequency. At first, these were on the fringes of the global economy; in 2007–09 they moved to its very core. Since 1971, national economies, and all our lives, have been shaped by this ‘system’, which can be described only as...