Join the City Political Economy Research Centre (CITYPERC) for a critical discussion of public debt and financialisaton in the UK.
Speaker: Sahil Dutta, City, University of London
Abstract
This talk traces the development of the £2.3 trillion market for UK public debt through the twentieth century.
Far from a simple product of investor preferences, it is the outcome of continual state and central bank construction and intervention, and key to the financialisaton of the UK economy today.
The big expansion of public debt to finance the two world wars established a public-private infrastructure through which sovereign debt management took place.
This provided the foundation to what became the Keynesian era. Yet when new, private debts displaced sovereign securities at the heart of this infrastructure in the late 1960s, sovereign debt management was thrown into crisis.
The response was a series of chaotic experiments with monetary targeting in the 1970s and 1980s that only deepened the problems.
The speaker argues that the Big Bang deregulation of 1986 and the liberalisation of the gilt repo-market a decade later were driven by the state and central bank’s effort to resolve these problems of sovereign debt management.
Far from mere enforcers of deregulated financial market rule, the state and central bank were and remain active participants.
About the speaker
Sahil Dutta is a lecturer in International Political Economy.
His research focuses on neoliberal public sector reform and sovereign debt management in the UK. He is co-author of 'Unprecedented: How Covid-19 Revealed the Politics of Our Economy'.
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