The trouble with the provision of public services such as health, education and the police by private for-profit companies is pretty obvious. Successive governments from Thatcher on, have pursued this flawed policy which derives from a hopelessly simplistic ideology. Private providers, who are subject to the discipline of the market, are held to be more [...]
Former UK Chancellor Alistair Darling’s memoir describes Gordon Brown’s approach as ‘a shambles’. As illustration, the much quoted description of a speech by the former Prime Minister about “neoclassical endogenous growth theory”. Brown started before the speech was fully written, so that part way through delivery, “a hand appeared from behind a curtain and handed [...]
Following the demise of Lehman Brothers almost three years ago, the then UK government, being committed free market idealists and N word phobic, pumped trillions of taxpayers’ money into the economy to keep it buoyant. But it did so by funding banks which would otherwise have collapsed, and then trying lamely to persuade them to [...]
The bonuses earned by the bankers, hedgers and various fund managers arise as a result of making fast, smart decisions about movements in currencies, commodity prices, food, energy and key resource shortages, and mergers and acquisitions and the like. The quick returns from such deals ensure that mini speculative bubbles keep getting inflated, and the [...]
In the United States, Goldman Sachs, hugely profitable out of the financial crisis, still rules the roost. According to Senator Carl Levin, chair of the senate permanent sub-committee on investigations, in the report on Wall Street and the Financial Crisis, it’s a “sordid story” of a “financial snake-pit, rife with greed, conflicts of interest [...]
The economic mainstream has flowed on its capital oriented way with relatively little deviation despite its manifest limitations, errors, omissions and downright falsehoods. And despite the occasional disasters to which it gives rise.
In the middle of last century, J M Keynes corrected some of the more apparent errors of the classical model, but his aim [...]
Before the British coalition government’s proposed cuts were announced they were greeted by 39 top business people writing to the Daily Telegraph confirming that they would create the necessary jobs so as to make the public sector cuts work. That way tax rises might be avoided and long-term cuts in public sector activity achieved. For [...]
David Cameron’s special advisory committee of ten on economic strategy includes five business graduates, five knights of the realm, three retailers, three asset strippers, two accountants, a banker, a lord, an advertising exec, a publishing exec, and Sir James Dyson. Only the last named has a background in manufacturing and is likely to have got [...]
Keynes recognised that the legislation protecting worker’s rights might lead to powerful trades unions, motivated by political ideals rather than the long term interests of their members, being the cause of wages led inflation damaging economic activity. His mistake was to argue that it was a political problem for governments, rather than a problem for [...]
The dilemmas facing the new British government, though not them alone, in dealing with the biggest ever peace-time indebtedness, are how much of public expenditure to cut, what to cut and how to cut it and above all when to start. Do too little too late and “the markets” won’t like it and that would [...]
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