UK Monopoly Capitalism: Applying a North American Brand to Britain

2016 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 98
Author(s):  
David Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Interest Rates ◽  
Substantial Proportion ◽  
Productive Capacity ◽  
Corporate Sector ◽  
British Economy ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
The Past ◽  
Investment Opportunities ◽  
The Uk

During the past decade, persistent excess productive capacity, at levels exceeding at times 25 percent, has blighted the British economy, along with rates of unemployment not experienced for two decades, with the result that a substantial proportion of the economy's productive resources remain underutilized. Orthodox economic theory often ascribes such phenomena to a lack of capital for investment. However, in the same period, interest rates have been historically low, and the UK corporate sector has accumulated increasing reserves of surplus capital. Clearly, there has been no shortage of capital for investment. The failure to invest stems not from the supply of capital, but instead from the paucity of investment opportunities, suggesting that British capitalism is mired in stagnation.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The UK economy

1998 ◽  
Vol 166 ◽  
pp. 8-27
Author(s):  
Richard Kneller ◽  
Rebecca Riley ◽  
Garry Young
Keyword(s):  
Monetary Policy ◽  
Asset Prices ◽  
Manufacturing Sector ◽  
Economic Situation ◽  
Corporate Sector ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Past ◽  
Consumer Surveys ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Economic Forecasts

There has been a very sharp deterioration in confidence about the economic situation in the UK over the past three months. This has been highlighted in a range of business and consumer surveys. It is also evident in profit warnings from the corporate sector, falling asset prices, high profile job losses, downward revisions in economic forecasts and an easing of monetary policy. This pessimism is not now confined to the manufacturing sector as appeared to be the case in the earlier part of the year, but seems to pervade all sectors of the economy.

Bouncing back

2010 ◽  
Vol 26 (6) ◽  
pp. 4-5
Author(s):  
Jim Watson ◽  
Rachael Richards
Keyword(s):  
Interest Rates ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Consumer Confidence ◽  
Content Type ◽  
British Economy ◽  
Bank Of England ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Bounce Back

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to discuss how the recession has affected UK businesses.Design/methodology/approachA viewpoint is expressed exploring the reasons for the current recession and its effect on the UK economy.FindingsIn order for the British economy to bounce back consumer confidence needs to return, the Bank of England needs to cut interest rates to stimulate consumer demand. Lower interest rates reduce the cost of borrowing and therefore people should be more willing to spend and invest.Originality/valueLessons have been learnt from this economic challenge and the UK's business leaders are ready to move on.

Wenn Geldkapital eine sichere Bank sucht

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (191) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernd Belina
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Economic Base ◽  
Secondary Circuit ◽  
Land Prices ◽  
The Past ◽  
Investment Opportunities ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Circuit Of Capital

The housing question is back on the agenda in Germany. House rents in urban areas in particular, where the vast majority of habitants are renters, are on the rise since the outbreak of the global financial and economic crisis in 2007/08. The first part of the article articles discusses David Harvey’s notion of the secondary circuit of capital in order to provide a politico-economic theory for a better understanding of the economic base of these processes. Harvey’s central argument is that the flow of money capital in search of investment opportunities is “switched” into the sphere of real estate in times of overaccumulation. The second part of the article provides empirical data on construction activities, buying and selling of built environment and the development of land prices, including speculation, in Germany that all point in the same direction: the secondary circuit is gaining in importance in the past ten years. Further, the data shows the geographical unevenness of these processes, as most activities are located in major cities.

Rising prices are not a long-run UK economy risk

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Interest Rates ◽  
Relative Price ◽  
Real Interest Rates ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Past ◽  
Price Adjustments ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The Future ◽  
High Inflation ◽  
The Uk

Significance There is little risk that inflation will return to heights seen in the 1980s as the authorities have the tools to control high inflation. However, their effective deployment depends on cooperation between the BoE and Her Majesty's Treasury (HM Treasury -- the finance ministry). Impacts The long-run demographic forces that kept real interest rates low in the past will continue to keep them low in the future. Low real rates and little risk of high inflation mean nominal rates will also remain low. Moderate inflation in the range 0-5% can be expected over the next decade. A dose of moderate inflation will be useful for the UK economy as it will ease the relative price adjustments needed during the recovery.

Evaluating Policy Reactions to the Financial Crisis

2009 ◽  
Vol 207 ◽  
pp. 39-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ray Barrell ◽  
Tatiana Fic ◽  
Dawn Holland
Keyword(s):  
Financial Crisis ◽  
Interest Rates ◽  
Euro Area ◽  
Banking Crisis ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
Lehman Brothers ◽  
European Banks ◽  
Current Financial Crisis ◽  
The Uk

The current financial crisis has evolved slowly over the past eighteen months, and policy reactions have responded to events. In August 2007 it became clear that a number of banks had lost some of their capital base as a result of defaults on home loans in the US. The impacts of these defaults had been spread across the Atlantic as they were contained within bundles of assets that had been constructed into securities and sold to European banks. By the autumn of 2007 it was clear that there was a strong risk of a banking crisis, as discussed by Barrell and Holland (2007) in the October 2007 Review. We considered that this was a risk, but that the costs were so obviously large that policymakers would strive to avoid it, and hence it was not our main scenario. We were wrong on both counts, and a crisis at least as large as that we discussed emerged after the US authorities let Lehman Brothers fail in September 2008. We argued that a crisis would lead to a reduction in growth of a cumulated 3 per cent in the US and a cumulated loss of about 2 ½ per cent in the UK and the Euro Area. If a crisis burst, we expected US interest rates to reach zero in 2009 with deflation toward the end of the year.

Dowagers, Debs, Nuns and Babies: The Politics of Nostalgia and the Older Woman in the British Sunday Night Television Serial

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-784 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estella Tincknell
Keyword(s):  
Older Women ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Mature Female ◽  
Older Woman ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Popular Television

The extensive commercial success of two well-made popular television drama serials screened in the UK at prime time on Sunday evenings during the winter of 2011–12, Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–) and Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012–), has appeared to consolidate the recent resurgence of the period drama during the 1990s and 2000s, as well as reassembling something like a mass audience for woman-centred realist narratives at a time when the fracturing and disassembling of such audiences seemed axiomatic. While ostensibly different in content, style and focus, the two programmes share a number of distinctive features, including a range of mature female characters who are sufficiently well drawn and socially diverse as to offer a profoundly pleasurable experience for the female viewer seeking representations of aging femininity that go beyond the sexualised body of the ‘successful ager’. Equally importantly, these two programmes present compelling examples of the ‘conjunctural text’, which appears at a moment of intense political polarisation, marking struggles over consent to a contemporary political position by re-presenting the past. Because both programmes foreground older women as crucial figures in their respective communities, but offer very different versions of the social role and ideological positioning that this entails, the underlying politics of such nostalgia becomes apparent. A critical analysis of these two versions of Britain's past thus highlights the ideological investments involved in period drama and the extent to which this ‘cosy’ genre may legitimate or challenge contemporary political claims.

Wilfred Ethier. Modern International Economics. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. 1983. xviii + 588 pp.

1988 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-83
Author(s):  
Nadeem A. Burney
Keyword(s):  
International Economic ◽  
New York ◽  
Economic Theory ◽  
International Economics ◽  
International Monetary System ◽  
International Markets ◽  
The Past ◽  
Monetary System ◽  
Recent Developments

Its been long recognized that various economies of the world are interlinked through international trade. The experience of the past several years, however, has demonstrated that this economic interdependence is far greater than was previously realized. In this context, the importance of international economic theory as an area distinct from general economics hardly needs any mentioning. What gives international economic theory this distinction is international markets for some goods and effects of national sovereignty on the character of economic activity. Wilfred Ethier's book, which incorporates recent developments in the field, is an excellent addition to textbooks on international economics for one- or twosemester undergraduate courses. The book mostly covers standard topics. A distinguishing feature of this book is its detailed analysis of the flexible exchange rates and a discussion of the various approaches used for their determination. Within each chapter, the author has extensively used facts, figures and major events to clarify the concepts in the light of the theoretical framework. The book also discusses, in a fair amount of detail, the existing international monetary system and the role of various international organizations.

Remaking Retirement

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Interest Rates ◽  
Older Workers ◽  
Older Persons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Older Population ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cost Of Education ◽  
The World ◽  
Low Interest Rates ◽  
Key Aspects

Around the world, people nearing and entering retirement are holding ever-greater levels of debt than in the past. This is not a benign situation, as many pre-retirees and retirees are stressed about their indebtedness. Moreover, this growth in debt among the older population may render retirees vulnerable to financial shocks, medical care bills, and changes in interest rates. Contributors to this volume explore key aspects of the rise in debt across older cohorts, drill down into the types of debt and reasons for debt incurred by the older population, and review policies to remedy some of the financial problems facing older persons, in the United States and elsewhere. The authors explore which groups are most affected by debt, and they also identify the factors causing this important increase in leverage at older ages. It is clear that the economic and market environments are influential when it comes to saving and debt. Access to easy borrowing, low interest rates, and the rising cost of education have had important impacts on how much people borrow, and how much debt they carry at older ages. In this environment, the capacity to manage debt is ever more important as older workers lack the opportunity to recover for mistakes.

scholarly journals Metaphors of migration over time

2021 ◽  
pp. 095792652199215
Author(s):  
Charlotte Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Emigration And Immigration ◽  
Emigrants And Immigrants ◽  
Economic Resource ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
The Past ◽  
Perception Of Control ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Metaphor Use ◽  
The Uk

This paper aims to cast light on contemporary migration rhetoric by integrating historical discourse analysis. I focus on continuity and change in conventionalised metaphorical framings of emigration and immigration in the UK-based Times newspaper from 1800 to 2018. The findings show that some metaphors persist throughout the 200-year time period (liquid, object), some are more recent in conventionalised form (animals, invader, weight) while others dropped out of conventionalised use before returning (commodity, guest). Furthermore, we see that the spread of metaphor use goes beyond correlation with migrant naming choices with both emigrants and immigrants occupying similar metaphorical frames historically. However, the analysis also shows that continuity in metaphor use cannot be assumed to correspond to stasis in framing and evaluation as the liquid metaphor is shown to have been more favourable in the past. A dominant frame throughout the period is migrants as an economic resource and the evaluation is determined by the speaker’s perception of control of this resource.

MONARCHS, TRAVELLERS AND EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC'S AGE OF REVOLUTIONS

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Sujit Sivasundaram
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Islanders ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Global History ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Cultural Terms ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Uk ◽  
A Site

AbstractThe Pacific has often been invisible in global histories written in the UK. Yet it has consistently been a site for contemplating the past and the future, even among Britons cast on its shores. In this lecture, I reconsider a critical moment of globalisation and empire, the ‘age of revolutions’ at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth century, by journeying with European voyagers to the Pacific Ocean. The lecture will point to what this age meant for Pacific islanders, in social, political and cultural terms. It works with a definition of the Pacific's age of revolutions as a surge of indigeneity met by a counter-revolutionary imperialism. What was involved in undertaking a European voyage changed in this era, even as one important expedition was interrupted by news from revolutionary Europe. Yet more fundamentally vocabularies and practices of monarchy were consolidated by islanders across the Pacific. This was followed by the outworkings of counter-revolutionary imperialism through agreements of alliance and alleged cessation. Such an argument allows me, for instance, to place the 1806 wreck of the Port-au-Prince within the Pacific's age of revolutions. This was an English ship used to raid French and Spanish targets in the Pacific, but which was stripped of its guns, iron, gunpowder and carronades by Tongans. To chart the trajectory from revolution and islander agency on to violence and empire is to appreciate the unsettled paths that gave rise to our modern world. This view foregrounds people who inhabited and travelled through the earth's oceanic frontiers. It is a global history from a specific place in the oceanic south, on the opposite side of the planet to Europe.

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