Economist Ann Pettifor explains how America’s industrial decline has its roots in the dismantling of the international monetary system established at Bretton Woods and in the rise of a global financial system that prioritizes capital mobility over production.
Economist Ann Pettifor is one of the world’s most authoritative and consequential voices on the themes of global finance, debt sovereignty, and sustainable economics. She is widely credited for having predicted the 2008 financial crisis in her book The Coming First World Debt Crisis (2006) as well as providing the main inspiration behind the Green New Deal. In 2000, she led the campaign Jubilee 2000, which resulted in the cancellation of $100 billion of debt for more than thirty of the world’s poorest countries.
In her latest book, The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and the Planet, she takes on the global financial system, showing us how its currently deregulated, de-territorialized iteration is at the root of so many of our current crises — from the erosion of democracy and the appeal to strongmen to the cost of living essentials all the way to climate change. In an interview for Jacobin, Bartolomeo Sala asked her how this system originally came into being, how it currently works in practice, and, more importantly, what an alternative system which works for both people and the planet would look like.
In your latest book, The Global Casino, you build a powerful case for the dismantling of the global financial system as it currently exists.
You show how unregulated capital flows and murky financial speculation happening in the “stratosphere” of the shadow banking system not only cause ever-frequent financial crises but are also at the root of the extractivist, export-led,…
Auteur: Ann Pettifor
