Social democracy’s blind spot for the international financial architecture and its power over domestic policy-making has had other consequences. Not only does neglect of the international system let globalized capital markets off the regulatory hook, but globalization has also led to the rise of economic nationalisms.
British economist
Ann Pettifor (born February 1947) is a British economist who advises governments and organisations. She has published several books. Her work focuses on the global financial system, sovereign debt restructuring, international finance and sustainable development. Pettifor is best known for correctly predicting the financial crisis of 2007–08. She was one of the leaders of the Jubilee 2000 debt cancellation campaign. She is the director of Policy Research In Macroeconomics (PRIME) a network of economists researching Keynesian monetary theory and policies, an honorary research fellow at the Political Economy Research Centre at City, University of London (CITYPERC), Chair of the Political Economy Research Centre's Advisory Board at Goldsmiths, a fellow of the New Economics Foundation, a director of Advocacy International and a trustee of the PREP Foundation for pluralist economics. Pettifor is a member of the Green New Deal Group of economists, environmentalists and entrepreneurs.
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In other words, we can – and to survive, we must – transform and even end within the next ten years the failed system of capitalism that now threatens to collapse earth’s life support systems and with them, human civilisation. We must replace that economic system with one that respects boundaries and limits; one that nurtures ‘soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity’;6 one that delivers social and economic justice.
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Globalization represents the tragic reversal of all that Keynes hoped to achieve at Bretton Woods: an international framework that would end nationalisms, international trade competition, high levels of domestic unemployment, low levels of aggregate demand and the consequent debt deflation. It was an attempt by Keynes and other economists to prevent the return of nationalisms and fascism by developing policies that increased domestic demand not by boosting exports and raising demand externally but by raising living standards at home: an inter-national system that would restore policy autonomy to democratic states and stability to the world’s economies.
The reality is that, today, all states are embedded in, governed by and subject to the international system of mobile, volatile, private financial markets – a system that has indebted and impoverished the many and raised political tensions, as reflected in the rise of nationalism. Millions of voters understand the nature of globalization, even while dimly aware of the monetary, fiscal or trade theories on which the system is built. This public awareness explains why some electorates have backed the election of “strong men” – politicians who offer “protection” from the very global markets that have stripped economies of jobs and income, while enriching rentier capitalists.