Policy Research in Macroeconomics

PRIME launches series on Just Money with Open Democracy

This week – beginning Monday 24th  February, 2014 –  PRIME’s director Ann Pettifor will launch and edit a series of articles on the finance sector for the website, Open Democracy. The aim of the series is to reach out to a wider, non-academic audience and broaden both understanding of the activities of the finance sector; to explore the relationship between the sector and professional economists and to stimulate further debate around monetary reform.

The series will be launched with an introductory article by Pettifor, which will draw on key themes from her recently published e-book: Just Money – How Society can break the Despotic Power of Finance.

There will follow articles by distinguished sociologist, Geoffrey Ingham, author of “The Nature of Money” and Prof. Steve Keen, author of Debunking Economics, who will once again lock horns with Prof. Paul Krugman in a debate about the nature of money and the link between debt and demand. Anastasia Nesvetailova, author of Financial Alchemy in Crisis will discuss the complexities of the shadow finance sector.

Costas Lapavistas author of “Profiting without Producing” will examine “the response of Marxist political economy to the most gigantic turmoil of world capitalism since the end of the World War II.”

Jeremy Smith (co-director of PRIME) has a contribution that explores the evolution of the metaphor “financial repression” – and its use in attacking governments that “may throw regulatory grit into the otherwise frictionless working of the financial services machine.”

Luca Fantacci, co-author of The End of Finance will make a proposal for “reuniting the monetary union” of the Eurozone.  Douglas Coe, a monetary reformer, will review a recent speech by Ms Christine Lagarde of the IMF, in which she argued that the finance sector should “serve rather than rule the real economy. ”

This series of articles on the financial system and its economic impacts is commissioned by PRIME, and will we hope, illuminate aspects of the financial and monetary system not widely explored within mainstream academia or the media, and will hopefully stimulate heated debate.

So please look out for these as they appear – and engage in the arguments and debates that are bound to emerge in the comment sections of Open Democracy.

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