In this post, PRIME’s co-director Jeremy Smith and Progressive Economy Forum Council member John Weeks analyse the current “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.

It’s budget time. Austerity has severely damaged Britain’s physical and social infrastructure. Coupled with a fall in real wages, austerity has shrunk Britain’s social wage. No wonder British voters are angry and disillusioned. So let’s examine the case for a £50 billion spend. For the NHS, local government, central government services, and unfreezing benefits…

It can be done within the levels of expenditure considered acceptable during the Thatcher era. All it takes is political will – and the overturning of the ‘Treasury View’.

Turkey and Argentina are non-identical twins; both countries suffered from almost simultaneous financial crises both in 2001 and 2018. Both are currently suffering from currency crises with potential spill-over to the rest of the emerging markets, and there are those who argue that these twins may have triggered a crisis in the emerging markets in 2018.

But this time Turkey, resisting too many internal and external calls for asking for help from the IMF, hired McKinsey & Company instead.

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 performed from an overall macroeconomic perspective. And in particular, whether any impact of the Single Market and NAFTA can be detected.

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 terms of timing and Parliamentary arithmetic, but above all since it poses the tough question – what question to ask the People to vote on? Or indeed what questions, plural?

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 new discoveries:

I returned from my travels thinking it won't be so difficult for Nigeria and Turkey to positively surprise people, as many put far too much weight on the negative issues that are well-known – crime and corruption in Nigeria, for example, or heavy-handed government in Turkey…

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. 

Dear Mrs. Pettifor,

it is my great pleasure to inform you in behalf of the international jury of  the „Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking“ that you have been unanimously selected to be the winner of the prize in 2018.

Die date of the ceremony is December 7, 2018.

The jury pointed out that you, a distinguished scholar, have had the courage to touch a complex topic that keeps influencing European and world affairs as well as the life of people all over the globe: the domination of the political realm by the dynamics of financial speculation…

For policymakers, the importance of private debt was the key take home from the financial crisis. Private debt is also a central theme in the Bank of England’s latest commentary around financial stability, with particular emphasis on the position in China and the US.

But there is a sense of this being only a partial account, with only very limited attention to the more generalised inflation of debt across a very large number of countries.

The world’s financial markets are hurtling towards a new phase of crises ranging from currency to balance of payments  to sovereign debt to banking crises. The monetary tightening policies of the United States Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank will only precipitate crises in emerging market as well as peripheral eurozone economies, which will have global repercussions.

Much of the debate over Brexit focuses on narrowly on trade in goods.  In that debate one finds relatively little discussion of the performance of the EU internal market with regard to commodity trade (“goods”). The typical argument for the British government negotiating a post-Brexit agreement presumes that EU internal market rules facilitate robust trade outcomes, and that operating outside of it would undermine goods trade.  But has the EU internal market in fact facilitated trade among members?  How should that be assessed?

Ten years ago the bursting of private debt ‘bubbles’ – most obviously in the US, UK and on the periphery of the EU – woke policymakers to the importance of balance sheet dynamics. Today, commentary by international organisations has ongoing rises in private debt as a key risk to global outcomes.

Severe as it has been for the welfare of the British people, eight years of so-called austerity under three Conservative governments are but the most recent manifestation of Tory assaults on public services.  Since Margaret Thatcher became prime minister almost forty years ago, contracting the public sector has been a constant theme across Tory governments.