About

Ann Pettifor

Ann is best known as a leader of a global social movement to cancel $100 billion of the debts of 42 of the world’s poorest countries, Jubilee 2000. Her achievement was recognised by amongst others, the University of Newcastle with an honorary doctorate, by the Archbishop of Canterbury with an honorary masters degree, and by the President of Nigeria, who named her a Member of the Order of the Niger (MON).

Her experience of working in the field of sovereign debt and international finance, her engagement with academics, officials of the IMF, the World Bank and the UN, her travels to countries like Japan, Indonesia and Argentina most affected by financial crises, deepened her understanding of the international financial system.

In 2003 she warned of the risk of  major economic failure in western economies when as a director of the new economics foundation, and editor of The Real World Economic Outlook (Palgrave 2003) she told BBC Radio 4’s Money Box that:

“There is going to be a crash when confidence evaporates. The housing bubble is based on this very ephemeral thing called confidence.

“When interest rates rise in the United States, when they continue to rise here - because the trend is now upwards - the crash will come.

“An awful lot of people will be hurt, and the economy overall will be hurt. ”

In this excerpt from the New Statesman published in September, 2003, Ann explained why the Credit Crunch was inevitable:

“When the central bank chiefs of America and Britain, Alan Greenspan and Eddie George, sidled up to (British and American consumers) in the 1980s and 1990s, nodded and winked, consumers took the hint, and dutifully embarked on a binge of borrowing and spending. The nod and the wink were never explicit, but the easy money policies that deregulated lending, boosted credit card companies and lowered interest rates have provided the incentives for consumers (on declining incomes) to borrow like there’s no tomorrow. That, consumers rightly calculate, is just what the powers that be want them to do.

And so debt has spiralled. By borrowing and spending, the middle-class consumers of the US and the UK, heroically and almost single-handedly, are holding up damaged economies, scarred by the bursting of asset bubbles such as stocks, telecoms and dotcoms. These bubbles, in turn, had their origins in the credit bubble created by central bankers and other deregulators.

But one group of people has stayed away from the party: the rich. According to (The Real World Economic Outlook, Sept. 2003) …..the rich have declined to become heavily indebted, both in the US and the UK. They have sat idly by and watched as central bankers helped inflate a credit bubble, which then flowed into and fortuitously pumped up the value of assets, including property.

The rich can’t believe their luck. The economic policies responsible are the kind they could only dream of for most of the postwar period. In all OECD economies over the past three decades, central bankers and finance ministers have clamped down on wage and price inflation, lowering labour and commodity costs. At the same time, they have recklessly let asset-price inflation rip, as we now see most notably in the stratospheric price of housing.

These double standards hurt the poor, and enriched the rich.”

Coming Soon: the new poor, New Statesman, 1st September, 2003)

In 2008, the economics editor of the Daily Mail, Alex Brummer, wrote of Ann’s analysis in his book”The Crunch”:

“The economist and activist Ann Pettifor - architect of the Jubilee 2000 movement on African debt forgiveness had previously warned of the dangers of debt and credit mountains that were building on both sides of the Atlantic. She argued convincingly that 9 August, 2007 would go down in history as ‘debtonation day’ the beginning of the end of the deregulation and privatisation of finance that had marked the era of globalisation.’

Alex Brummer, The Crunch: The Scandal of Northern Rock and the Escalating Credit Crisis, Random House, 2008.

To contact Ann, please write to jo@advocacyinternational.co.uk.