Tag Archives: Economics & Ideology

The Covid-19 crisis is deepening existing fissures and adding new threats to an already scarred and anxious world. As a localized health crisis became a global pandemic, many countries put broad swathes of their economies into a policy induced coma to halt the spread of the virus and ease the burden on overstretched health systems. As a result, the global economy will experience a recession this year on a scale not experienced since the 1930s. The damage will be both lasting and severe,...

The Covid-19 crisis is deepening existing fissures and adding new threats to an already scarred and anxious world. As a localized health crisis became a global pandemic, many countries put broad swathes of their economies into a policy induced coma to halt the spread of the virus and ease the burden on overstretched health systems. As a result, the global economy will experience a recession this year on a scale not experienced since the 1930s. The damage will be both lasting and severe,...

Even while the economy is recast for today’s pandemic on the back of the dismal failures of the past decade, austerity is already rearing its ugly head. At one level there must be politics here. The public must not be allowed to think that socialising the economy to meet a pandemic means the economy might be socialised when the pandemic is over. Likewise, obsessing about excessive debt means the greatly more pressing and more dangerous reality of deficient expenditure is side-lined. But it’s...

On Wednesday (30 September) the Office for National Statistics published its second estimate of GDP for the second quarter of 2020, April to June.  The very marginally positive news is that the fall, between Q1 and Q2, was reduced from 20.4% to 19.8%.  Since this was still the largest recorded quarterly fall since records commence in 1955, this is hardly a cause for jubilation – and even less so since the Q1 drop was raised from -2.2% to -2.5%. As we discuss below, the position would...

On Wednesday (30 September) the Office for National Statistics published its second estimate of GDP for the second quarter of 2020, April to June.  The very marginally positive news is that the fall, between Q1 and Q2, was reduced from 20.4% to 19.8%.  Since this was still the largest recorded quarterly fall since records commence in 1955, this is...

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 article appeared on the Open Democracy site on 16 June 2020 On the weekend of 30 May Elon Musk – a billionaire with a net worth of $38billion – launched a rocket into space. This private venture was in contrast to President Kennedy’s ‘moonshot’ ambition of 1961-69 ­– one of the greatest mobilizations of public resources and manpower in U.S. history. Musk’s ostensible aim is to colonise Mars; but his ultimate purpose is to extract future rents from billionaires ferried...

Extract from Resolutions of Brussels International Financial Conference 1920 SummaryThe UK is experiencing, as a result of the COVID 19 crisis and response, its most severe economic downturn on record; the largest in the last century was in 1921, when annual GDP fell by 9.7%.  In assessing the likely level of the fall, the Office for...

Image with acknowledgment to Needpix . “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day… But give him a loan to buy a boat and net to fish, and he will end up paying you all the fishes he catches.” By Michael Hudson, with Dirk Bezemer, Steve Keen and Sabri Öncü This article first appeared in Naked Capitalism  on 10th April  2020Summary After...

Nature of the Health Crisis The current health crisis has similarities to the Great Recession of 2008-2009, though fundamentally different.  The crisis ten years ago resulted from collapse of financial institutions, a purely human-made disaster whose solution should have been obvious.  The financial collapse provoked a severe contraction in...