New Economics Foundation

The British New Economics Foundation (NEF) was founded in 1986 by the initiators and organizers of the alternative economics congress The Other Economic Summit (TOES) as an independent think tank .

James Robertson , a British economist, and Alison Pritchard , a member of the Schumacher Society Council , helped set up The Other Economic Summit and together founded the NEF. The NEF formed and led the Jubilee 2000 campaign for debt relief for developing countries, known in Germany as the year of remission . In the years after 2000 she became known for her publication of sustainability indices. In 2003, Prospect magazine voted NEF “Think Tank of the Year”.

The stated purpose of the organization is to improve the quality of life by developing innovations that put people and planet earth first: prevailing doctrines in the areas of economy, the environment and social issues - such as ideas about growth in the modern economy - should be subjected to criticism.

In July 2006, the NEF launched the Happy Planet Index . It presents itself as an alternative to previous attempts to rank nation states economically and socio-politically, for example on the basis of their gross national product or the human development index .

Finance ecology

In July 2009 the UK Treasury published the White Paper Reforming Financial Markets . It cites wrong commercial decisions in connection with excessive leverage and extremely high risk-taking as the cause of the economic crisis . Both banks and non-banks have borrowed too much and bet too much. Particularly risky products such as buy-to-let mortgages show that “more and more eggs were laid in fewer and fewer baskets”. Then there was a wave of mergers that ultimately paid off for the agents entrusted with the merger, but not for the shareholders.

According to the Treasury's ruling, the crisis developed due to misjudgments in the US subprime market. The resulting losses for the banks led to the banks mutually questioning their creditworthiness, which then resulted in a general credit crunch. The fall of Lehman Brothers ultimately exposed the systemic crisis.

In the opinion of the NEF, what is still missing here and urgently needed is a positive vision of the overarching tasks that the banking system should fulfill. The alternative White Paper aims to close this gap.

The tasks of a financial system defined by Robert C. Merton are expanded by the NEF with the additional function of distributing economic resources temporally and regionally among environmentally sustainable projects in such a way that financial and social results can be achieved in the long term under conditions of uncertainty. The UK financial sector has not been particularly successful in the past with regard to the functions mentioned and has produced no or even negative performance for some economic operators. Responsible for this is a philosophy of laissez-faire with the responsible regulators, who trust that the market alone is able to set prices correctly. The course of the economic crisis from 2008 onwards has shown that this assumption is wrong. It is therefore the main task of the regulation of the financial markets not just to sort out a few “bad apples”, but to counteract the dysfunctions inherent in the system .

Web links

• new economics foundation

Individual evidence

1. ↑ About nef. ( Memento of the original from January 5, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ; Rajni Bakshi: The other economic summit and the New Economics Foundation. September 2008; Retrieved December 29, 2009. 
2. ^ Briefing 1: Transforming Economic Life. (No longer available online.) Schumacher Society, June 23, 2011, archived from the original on April 15, 2014 ; Retrieved April 14, 2014 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ↑ Kate Ruff: New Economics Foundation . In: International Encyclopedia of Civil Society . Springer, 2010, p. 1028-1029 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-0-387-93996-4_803 .
4. ↑ “ Economic growth no longer possible for rich countries, says new research ”, nef website ( memento of the original from January 28, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Jan. 25, 2010 
5. ^ The Ecology of Finance. ( Memento of the original from October 12, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 1.7 MB) 
6. ↑ "In the past few decades, economists simply took for granted that the financial system works." (Olaf Storbeck: About a bad fallacy of economists. Handelsblatt , January 14, 2010).