March 13, 2017
Political economist Pettifor, whose 2006 The Coming First World Debt Crisis was dismissed until its predictions came true, returns with a Keynesian deconstruction of the illusion that money is divorced from politics. Her central theme is the creation of money in the form of loans by commercial banks, and the toxic effect on the wider economy of the deregulation of that process. She focuses on the expanded role of the “shadow banking system,” which mixes commercial banking (lending and deposits) with speculative investment, a practice widely banned until the late 20th century. Pettifor places much of the blame for the 2007–2009 crisis on commercial banks’ ability to control their own interest rates, a problem she is at pains to point out is ongoing—the widely publicized low interest rates set by central banks like the Bank of England or the Federal Reserve apply to interbank lending, not to loans made to consumers. The solutions Pettifor presents are neither simple nor easy. They begin with tighter regulation of both fiscal and monetary policy, the opposition to which is so deeply entrenched in society that the whole enterprise seems almost doomed to fail from the outset. But in her rigorously argued view, the cost of doing nothing—cyclical financial crises, each more dire than the last—is too high.