Robert Skidelsky
Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords, is Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University.
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2012-01-20
| As with “the specter of Communism” that haunted Europe in Karl Marx’s famous manifesto, so today “[a]ll the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise” the specter of national debt. But statesmen who tremble before their national debt should remember that Marx’s specter, too, was a “nursery tale.”... read |
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2011-12-15
| The euro will survive, but the zone will shrink, sending shock waves around the world. But sometimes shock waves are needed to break the ice and start the water flowing again.... read |
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2011-11-21
| Politicians portray everything good that happens as the result of their exceptional talents and efforts, while everything bad is caused by someone or something else. But, when i comes to most advanced countries' inability to achieve a sustained recovery since 2008, they have only their own economic illiteracy to blame.... read |
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2011-10-20
| Whatever their intrinsic merits, none of the proposals for bank reform being debated nowadays addresses the global economy’s most immediate problem: undersupply, not oversupply, of credit. In other words, the challenge is to revive lending growth in full awareness that we must begin devising ways to rein it in.... read |
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2011-09-20
| Germany has been leading the opposition in the EU to any write-down of troubled eurozone members’ sovereign debt. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel should consider that, following World War I, her country was in a similar position – and the result for Germany, Europe, and the world was hardly optimal.... read |
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2011-08-19
| The Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, who died in 1992 at the age of 93, once remarked that returning to fashion requires only outliving your opponents. His great good fortune was to outlive Keynes for almost 50 years, and thus to claim a posthumous victory over a rival who had savaged him intellectually while he was alive.... read |
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2011-07-20
| Every week, the preposterous coterie of European bankers and finance ministers drags itself from one capital to another to discuss which default/restructuring plan to adopt. No one who is not well versed in financial legerdemain can make much sense of the various schemes, but behind them lie two moral attitudes, which are much easier to grasp.... read |
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2011-06-21
| You know that a doctrine is in trouble when even those claiming to defend it do not understand what it means. By that standard, the classic doctrine of free speech is in crisis.... read |
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2011-05-19
| Work-sharing is surely the most civilized solution to the problem of technology-driven unemployment. And yet all schemes aimed at easing the burden of work and increasing the amount of leisure risk falling victim to our genius for conjuring up new disasters.... read |
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Democracy or Finance?
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Robert Skidelsky 
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"Shorting" sovereign debt is how financial markets hold governments accountable. Ultimately, however, it is voters, not markets, that hold governments to account, and, when these two accounting standards diverge, the popular standard must prevail if democracy is to survive.... read
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2010-11-22
| The just concluded G-20 meeting in Seoul broke up without agreement on either currencies or trade. Despite global leaders’ vows to the contrary, it seems that the dreadful protectionist precedent of the 1930’s is about to be revived.... read |
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2011-01-20
| Perhaps socialism was not an alternative to capitalism, but its heir. It will inherit the earth not by dispossessing the rich of their property, but by providing motives and incentives for behavior that are unconnected with further – and unnecessary – wealth accumulation.... read |
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2008-09-15
| The looming bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, and the forced sale of Merrill Lynch, two of the greatest names in finance, mark the end of an era. The market optimism that led to de-regulation of financial markets in the 1980’s and 1990’s is over, and will be replaced by a new cycle of government intervention.... read |
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2010-11-22
| The just concluded G-20 meeting in Seoul broke up without agreement on either currencies or trade. Despite global leaders’ vows to the contrary, it seems that the dreadful protectionist precedent of the 1930’s is about to be revived.... read |
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2010-06-22
| John Maynard Keynes' main contribution to social democracy lies not in the specifics of policy, but in his insistence that the state as ultimate protector of the public good has a duty to supplement and regulate market forces. Today, that means stopping financial markets from behaving badly.... read |
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2009-04-21
| There is increasing agreement that four factors interacted to cause the current economic slump: financial innovation, global macroeconomic imbalances, cheap money, and the wrong theory of financial markets. But if we are going allocate blame, economists deserve more of it than anyone else, for they established the ideas that bankers, politicians, and regulators applied.... read |
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2008-03-11
| Today, there seems to be no coherent alternative to capitalism, yet it remains morally vulnerable. Because the market system has become dangerously dependent on economic success, any large-scale economic failure – such as the crisis we are witnessing today – will expose the shallowness of its moral claims. ... read |
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2008-06-19
| John McCain has been calling for the creation of a “League of Democracies” that would allow the US and its partners to bypass the UN. THe idea is incoherent and impracticable, but that doesn't make it any less dangerous.... read |
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2008-07-18
| Almost everyone seems to believe that Iran must be prevented at all costs from acquiring nuclear weapons. But, while every effort should be made to dissuade Iran from “going nuclear,” the floodgates to nuclear proliferation would not open if such efforts fail; a more likely outcome would be a “balance of terror” between Israel and Iran, as exists between India and Pakistan.... read |
2011-11-21
