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Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says the US has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
“In the US and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview overnight in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”
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The former prime minister Tony Blair has received millions of pounds through an unusual mixture of commercial, charitable and religious income streams. Since he stepped down from office in 2007, his financial affairs have been described by observers as “Byzantine” and “opaque”. The Guardian is now launching an online competition offering a prize to the person who can shine the brightest light on those financial structures.
Blair has a commercial consultancy, called Tony Blair Associates, plus jobs advising a US bank and a Swiss insurer. He has a multimillion pound book deal. He also has a charity, the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative, and another called the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. But much of the income, which includes charitable donations from other sources, has been funnelled through a structure called Windrush Ventures No 3 Limited Partnership. Our contest asks: what is Windrush?
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Ross Ashcroft catches up with Britain’s Buy to Let King Fergus Wilson.
A man who bizarrely seems to be totally in the dark to the underlying mechanisms that drive the property market.
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Keep in the know with news and information from our new Podcast offering. See what we will be sharing with you in this introduction by Fred Harrison.
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The Renegade Economist team presents an opportunity to learn what’s about to happen in the domestic and global economy, and …
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Fred talks complete sense. I just think it’s a shame that the new “c” word is not a derivation of the Latin word for female genitalia, but is even more shocking and offensive: “conspiracy”.
Fred says there is no conspiracy (June 19th), and yet in the next breath (June 26th) admits that economists deliberately mis-lead the public, and governments and bankers deliberately ignore the frankly obvious truth that exponential growth is impossible. If that isn’t a conspiracy Fred, I don’t know what it is.
Perhaps it is all just greed and short-termism. But I think it’s more. There is no way on earth that Harvard, Chicago, LSE, Oxford, Cambridge PhD’s in economics can genuinely believe their theories, models and forecasts, in the face of perpetually repeating evidence to the contrary. For them to then say “we couldn’t have foreseen this crisis” is a lie, pure and simple.
Stating, as the mainstream News has started to do, that the worst is over, and that there are “green shoots of recovery” is one of two things: complete and utter incompetence. Or, a conspiracy.
Whichever it is, the outcome is the same: Britain (and America) is engaged in a race to the bottom. And I for one am taking Jim Rogers’ advice: leaving.
Agreed, both Fred Harrison and Jim Rogers talk a lot of sense. The only difference is Rogers is interested in making money from investing (so is a parasyte), whereas Fred makes money from writing books which tell people what’s wrong with the system, and why there is so much injustice in the world. That is something productive and valuable.
I don’t think either are telling us just how bad things are going to get though. Britain is finished (as Rogers says). We will have runaway inflation, much worse than the 70’s. That decade ended with Thatcher’s election, and the start of privatising everything off, including, by stealth, state responsibility for social housing, and some other social services. Also, the hollowing out of British industry. History repeats, and by the time this “crisis” is finished, this will be a country of paupers, subsisting on handout scraps from a diminished welfare state, while an elite group of oligarchs own the entire national resource wealth and land between them. Welcome back to Feudal kleptocracy…