The UK’s official measure of inflation, the Office for National Statistics’ Consumer Price Index (CPI) came in slightly lower than widely anticipated, falling from 3.0% in August to 2.9% in September. This is good news, not so much for the (slight to non-existent) impact it implies for most people’s living standards, but because it will […]
Inflation, interest rates, locusts Read More »
Quantitative easing risks generating its own boom-and-bust cycles, and can thus be seen as an example of state-created financial instability. Governments must abandon the fiction that central banks create money independently from government, and must themselves spend the money created at their behest.
Where Has All the Money Gone? Read More »
Since QE was introduced in 2009, it has saved the government over £110bn in interest payments. This is a non-trivial sum, equivalent to nearly 2% of total tax revenue since QE started. For comparison, total NHS spending in 2019/20 was about £150bn. Without QE, the national debt would be at least 5% higher. The effect
Without Quantitative Easing the national debt would be more than £100bn higher Read More »
The pandemic has exposed how dependent on care we are not only as individuals, but as a society. But our care system, already struggling well before the outbreak of the coronavirus, has failed to cope. Care work is poorly-paid and insecure, whilst the entire system suffers from chronic underfunding. Government promises to fix the system
New PEF publication – Care and the Pandemic Read More »
PEF Council members recently discussed, via email, the government’s plans for social care and its financing. We were unanimous in agreeing on the bad design of the scheme, on the absence of real funding and reform for social care. And we also agreed on the need for a significant shift in the balance of taxation
Should we tax wealth to fund social care? Read More »
An interesting debate was opened by Labour’s MP for Neath, Christina Rees, in Parliament’s Westminster Hall last week on Italy’s “Marcora Law”. This is the legislation introduced there in 1985 to allow workers’ threatened with redundancy the option of exercising a right to purchase the company. Two government-administered funds provide the loan capital needed to
Worker ownership in post-Brexit Britain Read More »
The Conservative government looks set to announce that it will be introducing a rise in National Insurance Contributions of up to 1.25 percent on Tuesday this week. The intention is to raise around £10bn to attempt to staunch the crisis in social care – a crisis, it should be added, of the government’s own making,
Social care and the Tories’ raid on paypackets Read More »
Among the most depressing aspects of the latest IPCC report is the predictable lamentations by the usual suspects trotting out platitudes about the last chance to do something to stop the era of extinction rushing towards us all. Where is the acknowledgement from the likes of John Kelly and Alokh Sharma or sundry other spokespersons
The Threat of Extinction: Dismantle Rentier Capitalism Now Read More »
The Progressive Economy Forum is today publishing a short essay by economist Guy Standing on how the left can redefine its defence of the National Health Service – treating it not merely as a service provider for the unwell but a “socail commons” for the whole of society. Guy argues that successive governments, both New
New publication – The NHS as Social Commons Read More »
The Progressive Economy Forum is today publishing a detailed new guide to the economic programme of the Joe Biden administration. In less than six months since his inauguration as US President, Joe Biden’s administration has staked out a new agenda for US policymaking, breaking with the previous four decades of Republican and Democratic domestic economic
New PEF publication – guide to Joe Biden’s economic programme Read More »
