The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers Hardcover – Illustrated, March 28, 2017

Almost all economists in the early years of the century were as blind as bats in seeing the global 2007-09 coming recession. Not Ann Pettigrew who wrote a book explaining why it was coming. The problem is money and the fact -- unknown to most of the public -- that the big banks have the power to CREATE it. That's right, create money out of nothing. This gives the banks incredible power and why they are "too big to fail." How this works is explained in this book. But please take a look at a fine UK site called Positive Money which has videos and much info on the topic. It also has a critique of some of AP's ideas but both are on the same side. People know something is wrong in the financial world and that the system is not only rigged against most people but is slowly destroying our world. The rise of populism is a response to this but unless we define the problem we can't fight it. Ann Pettifor and Positive Money are our champions.(Don't let people with knee jerk reaction that this is some Godless socialism turn you away from investigating this. Positive Money is recommended and cited by Martin Wolf, the chief economic commentator for the Financial Times, hardly a leftie publication. Economist Milton Friedman proposed some related ideas long ago and he was the favorite economist of Ronald Reagan. The current economic system is rigged in favor of a tiny few and most likely another recession is only a few years away. .)

This book does several things I have never seen before. First, it is a powerful conceptual critique of modern economics that is wholly consistent with the minute technical details of what caused the Credit Crisis. Second, it explains not only why we have a dysfunctional financial system but its connection to environmental deterioration and the rise of populism. Third, it puts the responsibility for fixing the problem squarely where it belongs-on you and me-and tells us what we need to know. We need to understand money creation before we can see where and how it is being stolen from us. Fourth, the book reminds us that we can take a step backward and still move forward.

Ann Pettifor writes about economy in a language I can understand. Her bravery of debunking the dogma of mainstream economics and laying out alternatives for the future is commendable.Readable and inspiring.

Myth-shattering positive news for anyone trying to understand the politics of finance and how to restore this vital function of society to the common good.

Once again, Ann Pettifor's brilliance provide a trailblazing insight for advancing economic justice in our World!

If you are a left-wing activist, this is the book for you. If you are merely looking for information and economic explanations, it is not worth the price. The author has a clear-cut worldview: keynesian economics - good, insightful, modern versus "orthodox" economists and financiers, whom she calls robber barons.If you have some economic background, forget this book. Ms. Pettifor does not understand the difference between money, credit and saving and consequently she is completely clueless in relation to the topic she is writing about. The book is basically a pamphlet for the radical left to justify the silent socialization of the economy through government-controlled money creation.

This monetary expert thinks that monetary policy should be secondary to fiscal policy in the service of society. The book might be an excellent introduction to monetary finance and fiscal policy if only the author could keep her political ideology separate.To make a confession: I am an evil 'rentier' that left wing writers, Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman, Robert Reich and now Ann Pettifor seek to destroy. As a retiree with forty something years of work and savings, and a payed off mortgage, trying to live off investments, independent of government handouts, I want to learn how to accumulate the massive wealth and looting income that Madame Pettifor thinks I am doing. I want my share of her supposed “massive capital and criminal gains.” In actuality, after the Obama administration, the rentier class in the US is all but extinct. Remaining rentiers are in an existential struggle against ever increasing taxation, mostly hidden in the form of per-capita debt liability spending, government sponsored inflation, health care penalties and, most of all, artificially low interest rates. In the US, the finishing touch will likely be applied when the Sanders-Obama wing of the Democratic Party achieves its goal of eliminating the estate tax exemption.She touts democratic taxation policy. Does she think anyone in the US voted for a 17 trillion national debt? Anyone who thinks that our democratically elected representatives carry out our wishes on spending is delusional. Maybe it's different in the UK. Like most leftists, Pettifor defines things the way they should be rather than the way they are. Her ideology blinds her to reality. With the moral hubris of socialism, she takes the high moral ground with the simplistic formula: “forces for good - progressive forces.”I share her admiration of the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, expropriated by the Left who conveniently ignore that he was never an advocate of permanent deficit spending. True, austerity is not a road to growth, but neither is deficit spending eight years into a recovery. Among other references, she cites J.K. Galbreath's 'The Affluent American' as a true depiction of economic and social life and popular attitudes. When written in 1958, it probably was.She says that with credit cheap and available we don't need the wealthy for finance. I suppose that banks can lend to any hobo to build infrastructure or create a profitable innovative enterprise. Attempting a bit of scientific analysis with the history of usury in defending low interest rates, she shows a flattening growth curve supposedly compatible with nature. If valid, a flattening of the population growth curve will be terrible to behold.The note blaming commercial banks for the printing of money is not wrong, but peculiar and trivial It's not printing, but spending that creates debt and inflation. That's attributable to CBs and government as well as to private parties. In the US it's the Fed, not commercial banks that create money to facilitate the massive and generally misdirected federal spending. She deplores “unhealthy mistrust of government” then, within a page, cites corruption of regulators and elected politicians.She says that in the late 1960s private wealth began to exert control of the financial system. That timing just happens to be correlated with LBJ's guns and butter diplomacy spending that dissipated the Kennedy tax cut surplus and ran the US out of the gold needed to back the dollar in the Bretton Woods system.Her history of finance suffers from flawed memory. Saying that the Great Depression started in Germany mistakes German currency inflation for the depression. Hjalmar Schacht did, in fact, invoke monetary reform to create a new DM and break the triple digit German inflation. She suggests that the gold standard was replaced in 1934 by a Keynesian scheme. That's a partially accurate deception, as gold continued to back the US dollar until 1971. We certainly can't blame Keynes for the travesty of fiat currency, so favored by progressives.She's wrong about banks lending causing the recession of 2007-9. That was a cause, not an effect. The cause was the massive money creation in the name of the Great American Dream of home ownership following President Clinton's abrogation of Glass-Steagall, giving commercial banks license to spend on speculative investment in place of holding G-S restricted reserves. With a cornucopia of federal money on the table, it should be no surprise that somebody wants to steal it.Thinking that Irving Fisher and Milton Friedman were wrong, Pettifor says that the classical quantity theory of money is not valid. We have seen that it's the quantity of money that creates bubbles as well as predicting interest rates and prices. It's a manifestation of Say's Law, with money as the commodity in question. A huge influx of cheap money created great demand, much of it speculative with a component of greed and corruption. She says that money performs a function other than mere circulation. There are too many exceptions to make that a valid hypothesis, She must be the only person in the world to know what President Obama spent our $17 trillion debit on, let alone its function.Naively relying on government checks and balances, she wants to subordinate finance to labor (in her case, labour). She weighs in on global warming which suits her purpose of a public crusade adding government power to fix it all.In conclusion, Pottifor sees austerity weakening the global economy and causing disillusion with democracy. Offshore capital should be brought back to its country, to be accomplished by regulation, ignoring tax incentives. In reality, globalization is a fact of life, not a fixit policy. Financial institutions should be at the service of society, read government. Resorting to the populism that she deplores, she enlists the support of women and environmentalists. She somehow construes that her monetary contenders are dismissive of both. Otherwise the conclusion contains progressive double talk like “We can turn the clock back and move forward.”

This is a mercifully short and well-written discussion of what neoliberal finance capital has done to the world. There's a lot to like but one thing that really grabbed me was her idea that the over-emphasis on private (compounding) debt financing has created a world in which ever greater returns are required to service ever greater debt. This creates pressure to simply destroy the earth in order to pay off an artificial debt.The simple reality is that the finance industry is killing the world, and it's got to stop. This is a fine little primer on where to start.