conomist ann Pettifor puts her success down to being an outsider.  "I was born in South africa - I'm african - so was very interested in why african countries built up such large sovereign debts after the 1970s." This not only provided the impetus for her groundbreaking campaign Jubilee 2000, which resulted in the cancellation of $100bn of debt owed by more than 35 countries, but also led to her spotting the looming credit crunch. When she became director of international finance at the New Economics Foundation in 2001, she arrived worrying about the debts of poor countries, but then was shocked at rising debt levels in the west.  "I was like the boy in the Emperor's New Clothes," she says. "I hadn't been immersed in neo-liberal economics so I looked at the situation with fresh eyes." Pettifor edited a book accurately predicting the credit crunch in 2003 and wrote another in 2006, detailing the extent of the problems with the current global financial architecture, so you'd think economists and bankers might sit up and listen now - but her approach is still at odds with the mainstream. "Bankers tell us that for government to find the resources to deal with climate change, private bankers must be paid high rates of interest. That need not be so. The question is, how do we exercise control over our monetary system?"  She says that what she wants to contribute is Keynes's great insight - "that we can afford what we can do" - and that quantitative easing has shown that the banks can create money out of thin air. "Billions were conjured by Mervyn King to bail out the financial  system, now we need to use the banking  system to make things happen for the ecosystem. Saying we can't afford to deal with climate change is like saying we can't afford to survive. We have the highest youth unemployment in history. How foolish to suggest we can't afford to use the energy, talents and skills of young people to tackle climate change."