We live in a dangerous time when the FT promotes a form of hardline, and deeply undemocratic monetarism.
It's dangerous that some on the left have bought into Positive Money's ideas.
The battle for money has begun. It is essential that it is won.Tax Research UK
In a recent Financial Times article, Martin Sandbu identifies three major economic failures of competitive capitalism in the West: growing inequality; the disproportionate effects of The Great Recession on young people; and the threat of displacement in labor markets brought by improving technology and the presumed ubiquity of artificial intelligence. Sandbu connects these failures to recent victories of populist “extremist” parties in the EU, UK, and US, and asserts that if liberalism and competitive capitalism are to remain a viable and persuasive platform for the next generations a bolder thinking from the Western political economy is now more necessary than ever.
This need to revamp Western capitalism has brought renewed attention to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), a school of thought that offers an important and bold perspective on economics and policy solutions. A universal basic income (UBI), universal basic services (UBS), and a job guarantee by the State are most commonly cited as a bold fix to current problems. So, it is worth asking, what are the merits of these aforementioned proposals, through the lens of MMT?...The Minskys
The Financial Times editorial page carries a logo that proclaims: “Without fear and without favour”. Indeed the editors have shown no fear when it comes to. . . fabricating lies, promoting imperial wars decimating countries and impoverishing millions, whether in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and now Venezuela. The fearless “Lies of Our Times” have been at the forefront forging pretexts for inciting imperial armies to crush independent governments.…Mouthpiece of bourgeois liberalism and its propaganda machine bent on imposing a neoliberal world order based on transnational corporate totalitarianism.
Financial Times sold to Japanese media group Nikkei for £844m
For decades the Financial Times has hardly had a good word to say about the Japanese economy. It is a special irony therefore that the paper’s longtime British owner, the Pearson group, has now agreed to sell it to the Tokyo-based Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei) group.
How come it is Nikkei that is buying the FT, not the other way around? After all, the two companies have cooperated since at least as far back as the 1980s, and during most of that time the FT people have tended to condescend to their Japanese counterparts.
The truth is that Nikkei is a much stronger enterprise than the FT. This reflects the fact that the Japanese economy has been doing much better than successive FT correspondents – and their colleagues elsewhere in the anglophone media – have noticed.
One key factor that has led foreign observers to go astray is ideology: because Japan does not believe in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”, its economic workings are reflexively belittled by many anglophone correspondents. FT correspondents in particular have long been blind to the long-term efficacy of the Japanese higher bureaucracy’s agenda – an agenda that has focused particularly on developing the nation’s prowess in manufactured exports. They generally eschew services because services typically need to be performed close to the customer and thus are much weaker exporters.
For nearly a century and a half, Japanese officials have been highly successful in “industrial targeting”. If they want to achieve global dominance in any particular industry, they take direct aim at foreign competitors and have little compunction about systematically weakening them. Hence, for instance, the fate of such once world-beating British industries as textile equipment, shipbuilding, motorcycles and compact family cars.…
The strength of the Japanese economy is evident in many other ways. Take healthcare. …. The key driver has been improvements in Japan’s socialist medical system.…
Another telling indicator is unemployment. As newly arrived foreign companies quickly discover, there is no reserve army of the unemployed.….
As for the FT, its takeover is consistent with a long-term trend for more and more of the commanding heights of the British economy to come under foreign control. Previous examples have included Corus, Cadbury, Pilkington and Jaguar. The difference is that this time, Britain is losing part of its soul.The Guardian
In publishing on Russia, there comes a time when a writer, journalist, bank analyst, television presenter, or academic produces something so lacking in truthfulness, so replete with fawning and meretriciousness, that this website must kill and skin another goat; dry out the vellum; and have a fresh scroll inscribed with the Cat’s Paw – that’s the Personal Abasement Award (PAW).TPTB have never forgiven Putin for taming the oligarchs to whom Yeltsin and the Harvard Boyz turned Russia over to. This is what regime change in Russia is really all about — reinstalling the rule of the oligarchs in an oligarchic democracy modeled on the developed countries of the West. This their model for neoliberal globalization, and they will do whatever it takes to impose it.
This award is designed to encourage accountability and ethical reporting on Russia. The PAW committee decided to suspend the Cat’s Paw awards when the start of the Ukraine civil war threatened to overwhelm the supply of vellum and the goat population on which it depends. The goats who have earned the Cat’s PAW scroll have also multiplied exponentially.
At the Financial Times’ Moscow Bureau there has been a tradition of viewing Russian business figures as agents of regime change, making them appear the harbingers of democracy, and pitting them against the Kremlin; that is, once Boris Yeltsin’s destruction of the Russian parliament in 1993, and his election steal in 1996, failed to do the Russian reform trick. For FT reporters this has meant advertorial promotion of the oligarchs applying to the City of London to raise debt and equity finance; buying London and country real estate; promoting themselves with British public relations and deterring investigation of their business with British libel law firms.
The FT reporters have been closely pressed by rivals at The Times, the New York Times, the Guardian, and other print and broadcast media....
So the mistake the Financial Times made was not that they allowed one of their best investigative journalists to look at Piketty’s spreadsheets (which Piketty had, to his great credit, made publicly available). As I said in my earlier post, a FT article that looked at the alternative sources for UK wealth inequality data, and questioned the idea that wealth inequality was inevitably rising in most countries, would have been an interesting piece. [1] The paper’s mistake was to write the story as an exposé.Headline: Oxford professor calls the Financial Times political hacks.
Why did the Financial Times want to run a ‘gotcha’ piece in the first place? Of course Piketty has become something of a celebrity, and tabloids love to knock celebrities down. But the FT is no tabloid, and to think it was just about celebrity may be politically naive. As Henry Farrell and Mike Konczal noted in a typically acute pair of posts, a focus on inequality as a central issue in economics is very threatening to some, and many of those who feel threatened will read the Financial Times.
Piketty's full response from Vox EU (see also Paul Krugman: Thomas Doubting Refuted and Simon Wren-Lewis: What the Financial Times got (very) wrong)Economist's View
Thomas Piketty has now published his detailed reply (dated 28th May) to two withering attacks by Chris Giles, the Financial Times’ economics editor, on his data and use of data, in particular in relation to the proportion (over time) of wealth-ownership of the top 1% and 10%. On most points, Piketty has answered the points in a reasonable (and to me generally persuasive) way. But the way Chris Giles kick-started the debate, it was clear that this is not simply an economic issue and battle, but a political one too.
So no doubt the argument will continue, with left and right contesting the terrain. But has the quite personalised form of attack by the FT’s Economics Editor had the effect of damaging his newspaper’s reputation for even-handedness and objectivity?...
This is sharp and effective journalism, but not unbiased journalism. It is attack dog Daily Mail style, calculated to damage the reputation of the adversary. But it is at variance with the FT’s usually even-handed way of dealing with controversy, and was followed up with an editorial – in less virulent terms – premised on the assumption that Piketty was materially wrong.Surprise. It's about politics and not economics. Who could have known.
I believe, in short, that the FT and Mr Giles have handled this affair badly and unfairly through what looks like an ad hominem attack with a political dimension - and that many others also see this. That cannot be good for the FT’s reputatoin, even if it helps with short-term sales.
Having said all this, in my view there are serious issues around the definition of “capital”, “wealth” and “patrimony”, and the consequences to draw from them, in Piketty’s work, which tend in the opposite direction to Giles. The issue is one of power of the very wealthy, and the access to leverage to impose that power. Think Manchester United and the Glazer family, where being a billionaire allowed Mr Glazer to use debt (therefore a subtraction from wealth in official statistics) to obtain a key asset and power.There it is again: wealthy = power.
Similarly, I think I am qualified to lament that the Financial Times published Niall Ferguson's misleading screed on July 19, 2010....
Could we please have some acknowledgement of the fact that the reason the debt-to-GDP ratio did not rise across the 1930s was because GDP rose, not because debt didn't rise? Debt more than doubled from $22.5 billion to $49.0 billion between June 30, 1933 and June 30, 1941. But nominal GDP rose from $56 billion in 1933 to $127 billion in 1941.
And could we please have some acknowledgement that our 9.4% of GDP deficit in fiscal 2010 pales in comparison to the 30.8% of GDP deficit of 1943, or the 23.3% and 22.0% deficits of 1944 and 1945?
Niall Ferguson should not do this. The Financial Times should not enable Niall Ferguson to do this.Grasping Reality with Every Possible Tentacle
Read it at The Financial Times
Today, as the Financial Times launches “Capitalism in crisis” – a series of articles about the problem of legitimacy that afflicts our economic system – there is a growing recognition that executive pay needs reining in.
