Terry Barker Profile picture
Oct 14, 2022 13 tweets 6 min read Read on X
The crisis is upon us. The PM & Chancellor have provoked the interlinked financial markets & the bear has woken, angry & hungry. What should the PM, with power, do? Remove the dart that wounds the beast. Calm & if necessary subdue it. Convene wise & experienced councils.
Combat climate change. But now, today: 1. Replace Kwarteng by Sunak, & cancel #budget2022. It has been an unmitigated disaster, politically & economically. 2. Reappoint a previous respected mandarin to head @hmtreasury to reassure the public & the markets.
3. Convene an open public meeting of the PM, the Chancellor, the Governor @bankofengland , the head of the @OBR_UK & the head of the @TheFCA to further reassure the markets. The turmoil must be stopped urgently before bankruptcies overtake policy. The markets take no prisoners.
This may not work because the crisis is led essentially by the @federalreserve in the USA. In which case, markets must be closed, key currency rates frozen at agreed levels, major bank bankruptcies anticipated & managed for the public good, & the #GreenNewDeal agenda implemented.
Although this is an international crisis, the solution is both national and international. Many governments & institutions must work together now, before the system collapses. Remember Putin is waging war on the West, and threatening nuclear Armageddon. And fracking Mother Earth.
@OPECSecretariat is central to ending the #SecondGreatFinancialCrisis. Rises in the world oil & gas prices started it. Falls can help end it. The G7 should expand to include 🇨🇳&🇮🇳, because they too do not want nuclear war. Geopolitics is shifting as I tweet. The abyss beckons.
Finally, mitigating & adapting to climate change is an essential part of the solution to the #SecondGFC. And the mainstream neoclassical solutions are mostly pseudoscientific nonsense. New economics should guide us, with new literature on feasible paths to 2050 for all to follow.
The #SecondGFC shows us where the #DiciplineoftheMarkets gets us. Firm rule of financial markets? Who are they kidding? The markets are more like angry beasts that need discipline, not our masters, to rule over us. Financial discipline is right wing tosh. #PostTruthEconomics
The ignorance of those who pontificate about free markets should go & live in them. Drug-addled neighborhoods, gangster-run ghettos, & mob-run shanty towns, are all free markets. Markets need good institutions & strong regulation for the public good. They bind society together.
What emerges from the present chaos, is a growing realization of the damage wrought by #Financialization following the UK Big Bang of the 1980s and the 1999 deregulation of the US banks. One financial crisis after another.
Real markets, which actually produce goods & services that people want, languish behind financial skulduggery, currency speculation, & private-equity short-term play. The balance is wrong, Financial markets should be the servants of the real markets, not their masters.
The banks that nearly went bankrupt in the #GFC should have done so, their directors investigated & sacked for misconduct. It’s not difficult. Scandinavian countries did it in the early 1990s. Iceland showed the way after the 2008-10 crisis, with some bankers going to jail.
Left unresolved, #Financialization will eventually lead to worse disasters, with the rich growing richer & the poor more numerous. Mother Earth will be trashed for the sake of more estates, mansions, yachts, & fancy private jets. Urgent reform needed supervised by @BIS_org

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More from @terry_barker21

Apr 23, 2023
Exactly this. Past and current Cabinet Ministers appear seriously ignorant about the United Kingdom’s constitutional governance, & the role of civil servants in relation to the executive. The politicisation of the service is relatively recent, and has already gone too far.
The outrageous disrespecting & attempted or actual replacing of Permanent Secretaries by sycophants during the #Brexit years was unconstitutional & corrosive of good government. Our government has become populist & authoritarian. Standards of public service have been set aside.
Almost anything ministers have wanted to do has been allowed by the #Brexit so-called “elite” to the point where civil servants have been abused by bullying, relocation, lies, & intimidation. This whole episode of government is deeply shameful.
Read 4 tweets
Apr 23, 2023
Incredibly, the 2022 stress tests for the UK banks also did not include testing for substantial hikes in interest rates. The list of failures, policy mistakes, & uncovered crimes, of UK governments & their bankers, grows by the day. #TimeForAChange
Instead of this reckoning, we should be focused on #NetZero now, the #CostOfLivingCrisis and the coronation. We must move on from the rotten Tory system to survive. #GeneralElectionNow
The gutter press supporting the Tory right are on a mission to distract the people so that they overlook the destruction of the country’s infrastructure, society, and economy by the last 5 destructive if not actually corrupt Tory governments.
Read 4 tweets
Apr 23, 2023
English water ways are an international disgrace. So-called plans for improvement are announced by Tory governments, but they tend to remain plans, not actions. The pollution continues unabated.
Then at the next election, after yet another failure, the Tories promise to do better. And the whole disgraceful, #PostTruthSociety vicious circle of #PublicRelations , half truths & lies is repeated again, while the #Finacialization of the water industry goes on, unabated.
There’s money to be made by the water companies pouring their sewage into our rivers and onto our beaches. So, being greedy, they do it to add to their Directors’s bonuses & shareholders’ dividends.
Read 8 tweets
Apr 22, 2023
Lol! I think that Raab is the real scary one, but he/she? is no longer lined up to face the cameras as a Minister. And the Prime Minister is also awol, stunned by his own indecisiveness. Raab holds intemperate views about the #CivilServants of the UK conspiring against him.
#DominicRaab is very cross. Tossed out on his ear by a cabal of conspiring servants, who dared to speak up against his ungentlemanly behaviour. Or correctly, tossed out by himself in response to outrageous allegations, now confirmed as bullying, about his Ministerial misconduct.
Our UK unwritten constitution has a lot to say about the role of civil servants in relation to the executive and the legislative roles of government. In brief they are independent impartial, knowledgeable, competent, tested, & trusted to do a good job.
Read 13 tweets
Apr 15, 2023
Thanks for useful summary of how “heterodox” economics is defined. The name is problematic, since it appears to be “non-orthodox”, yet “orthodox” economics is left undefined. Is it “mainstream”? I prefer “new” versus “old” economics, which are not defined by their age but …
.. in relation to the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s. Keynesian economics was characterised after WW2 as “new” in relation to the “old”, neoclassical, Marshallian, economics that preceded it. The counter-revolution of the Samuelson neoclassical school eventually prevailed.
However, #NeoclassicalEconomics has, essentially met its demise in the ongoing collapse of free-market capitalism (or neoliberalism), inaugurated by the #GFC, which exposed that “the banks were too big to fail”. Bankruptcy is an essential feature of capitalism.
Read 7 tweets
Apr 14, 2023
#ClimateActionNow implies that we should all act now to do what we can, bring reasonable about it. We can check what fossil fuel we could stop burning, or at least reduce burning. And reduce its use.
The best way of reducing GHG emissions is by changing personal behavior by changing our routines. Switch from a car to a e-bike, walk to the shops, review all the uses of electricity at home and switch off unnecessary uses.
Read 5 tweets

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