Some people involved in global anti-poverty campaigns have been watching the global financial crisis engulfing rich nations with a sense of deja vu. Ann Pettifor, who did so much to campaign against the unsustainable and illegitimate debt of less developed countries, warned about the development of similar debts inside G8 economies. But the big question [...]

Filed under: Financial crisis, International development | No Comments »

I detect the start of ‘credit crunch - it can’t be all bad’ sentiments.
Some of it is entirely justifiable schadenfreude at those losing their telephone number sized bonuses, though I expect they will soon get round this. It’s a pity we cannot use the Freedom of Information Act to demand a transcript of the discussions in [...]

Filed under: Financial crisis, They Just Don't Get It | No Comments »

Richard Freeman is a top labour market economist - a professor at Harvard and senior fellow at the LSE - who takes a sympathetic ‘critical friend’ interest in the trade union movement. I’ve only just spotted this post from a few days ago from the US blog Today’s Workplace. Its conclusions will not surprise, but it [...]

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I don’t want to “hog the blog” but I couldn’t resist reproducing this gem from today’s Financial Times editorial:

Filed under: Tax | No Comments »

The developing crisis on Wall Street will raise a long and intense debate about state regulation of the capital markets.  But the problem is not just the rules that govern trading, it is also the culture of major financial centres which in recent years has clearly become deeply irresponsible and even more herd like than in the [...]

Filed under: Corporate governance, Pensions | No Comments »

There is no doubt that the credit crunch has squeezed most of the life out of the mortgage market, but are house prices really falling as fast as the lenders say? The answer is ‘no’, and this is because a significant minority of houses are actually bought without credit and therefore do not show up [...]

Filed under: Housing | No Comments »