It was a packed Zoom to listen to Andrew Smithers talk on economic theory today.
The video of the event is available here and it’s well worth viewing – even if you missed the chat and the frisson of the Q&A live.
Andrew Smithers is a legend to many economists and though I came into this meeting sceptical, I was won over by the clarity of thinking and the modesty of the man.
It’s good fun at the Pension PlayPen at the moment. We have 1200 members and it’s nice to see that the numbers paying a voluntary subscription to help us keep going is rising.
The PlayPen’s not there to make money, but we don’t want to lose money either – so your contributions are most welcome.
Many people asked for the slides and they are viewable and downloadable from this SlideShare link
The comments made by Andrew about short termism. Executive options and leveraged buy backs does need a policy change to stop this abuse. Models that create excess profits at the expense of an uneducated poor just makes the have have not divide worse. Andrew has made this point in earlier books but who is brave enough to take the remedial action ? Collective schemes make it impossible for the individual to have a voice DC a with all its limitations speaks the truth for the individual.
Finally the lifespan of the entity making the initial promise is an unacceptable risk
There were so many things I was not agreeing today with Andrew.
To me Andrew looked like a socialist who believes in political utopias, trying to sort out capitalism in a nice way! Like we start all over again with no debt, no old population, etc
I thought Andrew gave us at least three ways to reduce “the debt”:
Growth through investment, stimulated by investment credits which don’t add to debt
Reduce certain types of public spending through a more effective form
of budgetary control
“Inflate” the fixed element of debt through monetary policy, ie higher money supply.