Philip Pilkington on the Financial Sector in the Guardian

Philip Pilkington has a great article in the Guardian on the UK financial sector:

Philip Pilkington, “The Left needs a Deft Touch in Tackling the Financial Sector’s Dominance,” Guardian.com, 4 April 2014.

There are some further comments here.

He reviews the decline of British manufacturing after Thatcher’s disastrous economics policies and the rise of the financial sector, and how reform of the financial sector must be accompanied by policies to reduce the trade deficit by rebuilding British manufacturing to address any possible balance of payments imbalance.

I would suggest a state-funded industrial policy that could be designed to use automation and increasingly cheap robotics to re-shore manufacturing from overseas (re-shoring is already a clear trend in the US, though not perhaps because of explicit government support), accompanied with increased Keynesian stimulus on public infrastructure and social spending plus the MMT Job Guarantee.