Central banks need to go greener, faster
22 January, 2018Policymakers increasingly recognise that building a low-carbon economy means reforming the financial system. In September the government set up a taskforce to advise policy development on green finance, and now the Environmental Audit Committee is carrying out its own Green Finance inquiry. But, as Positive Money wrote in our response to the committee’s call for evidence, [...]
The Bank of England needs to think outside the box
13 December, 2017Governor Mark Carney will have to pen a letter to the Chancellor, as inflation figures out yesterday showed price rises of 3 per cent - meaning the Bank of England has missed its target by a whole percentage point. It won’t be an easy letter to write. Faced with twin threats of rising inflation and [...]
Why diversity is key to the Bank of England’s future
9 December, 2017Until recently, central bank independence seemed firmly established among our economic institutions. Now, though, its future looks more uncertain than ever in its 20-year history. The Bank of England finds itself under fire from many angles. When it raised interest rates for the first time in a decade last month, the TUC’s Frances O’Grady called [...]
Preventing climate change means reforming money and finance
3 November, 2017In many ways, the effects of the present money and banking system - financial instability, unemployment, rising debt levels are usually thought of as economic issues. Yet not everything should be read in purely economic terms. The economy leaves deep marks on the social and material world in which it is embedded. And climate change [...]
The Bank of England’s boost to wealth inequality is all but impossible to reverse
28 October, 2017Should governments have to clean up the damage left by their central banks? In a speech given in December, Mark Carney - echoing a classic refrain heard from the Bank of England - insisted that ‘all monetary policy has distributional effects, but it is rightly the role of elected governments to take measures to offset [...]
What’s the difference between wealth inequality and income inequality, and why does it matter?
19 October, 2017Wealth inequality is in the news, with our friends at IPPR pointing to just how ‘unevenly divided’ wealth is in the UK. The problem is huge: the top 10% of households are 875 times wealthier than those at the bottom. But why is there so much focus on wealth inequality - and what’s the difference [...]
Positive Money’s Economics: Keynes, not Friedman
12 October, 2017Our proposals have little to do with the economic school of monetarism, in the vein of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School. Instead, John Maynard Keynes remains the intellectual forerunner for our work. “The ideas of economists and political philosophers... are more powerful than is commonly understood... Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite [...]
Out of the Darkness: Can a reformed financial system solve the world’s biggest problems? (Video)
20 September, 2017It has been 10 years since the financial crash of 2007-8 and the dysfunction of our banking system is finally under scrutiny. A recent event for Positive Money on 18th September 2017 saw 200 people gather at the RSA (Royal Society of Arts) to watch a panel do just that. Asking whether ‘a reformed financial [...]
Making monetary policy work for economic justice
8 September, 2017Welcome news this week came from the IPPR Commission on Economic Justice with the publication of their interim report. Prominent voices in business, politics and academia have lent their weight to the report, which assesses the ‘broken’ economic model - or, as the authors prefer, ‘economic muddle’ - we in the UK are burdened with. [...]