Subjects Archives: Financialization

It is not just the immediate effect on Europe that threatens to be severely adverse; capital has already started relocating away from Europe to the United States, a trend that will inevitably gather momentum, so that long-term growth and hence employment prospects on that continent will also be affected.

The U.S. Federal Reserve (the Fed) is supposed to have a dual mandate of “maximum employment and price stability.” However, a close look at its policies since 1980 have shown it very willing to sacrifice the former for the latter.

By trying to convince voters that debt relief will cost them, and that a more egalitarian society is impossible, corporate media are defending America’s ruling class from an educated working class.

Sep 20, 2022 (IPS). Policymakers have become obsessed with achieving low inflation. Many central banks adopt inflation targeting (IT) monetary policy (MP) frameworks in various ways. Some have mandates to keep inflation at 2% over the medium term. Many believe this ensures sustained long-term prosperity. 

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) decided this week to take the side of Ukraine in the current war; blame Russia for the shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP); and issue a demand for Russia to surrender the plant to the Kiev regime “to regain full control over all nuclear facilities within Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders, including the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant.”

The so-called electricity markets were created to help private capital, not people. It is time we wound up these bogus markets and returned public services to people, to be run cooperatively for their benefit

This famous sentence from Joseph Ki-Zerbo could be translated as ‘we do not enforce development; we develop ourselves.’ However, development paradigms have been largely influenced by external views, mainly those of Western countries.

After a quarter century of economic stagnation, African economic recovery early in the 21st century was under great pressure even before the pandemic, due to new trade arrangements, falling commodity prices and severe environmental stress.

Ukraine’s Western-backed leader Volodymyr Zelensky opened the New York Stock Exchange telling Wall Street his country is “open” for foreign corporations to exploit it with $400 billion in state selloffs.

Developed countries use 3.5% of their income to pay interest on their debt, while developing ones must use 14%, which complicates their situation.

Yves here. There have been a lot of suggestions about how to improve the Biden student debt forgiveness plan.

ECONOMISTS distinguish between two kinds of inflation: “demand-pull” and “cost-push”.

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 30 2022 (IPS) – Most sub-Saharan African French colonies got formal independence in the 1960s. But their economies have progressed little, leaving most people in poverty, and generally worse off than in other post-colonial African economies. 

In no time after the retreat from Afghanistan, NATO is already immersed in another proxy war in Europe, and the alliance, at U.S. behest, is lurching toward the Arctic to counter Russia and China’s “big plans for the polar region.”

GOP war hawks slam Biden initiative for “undermining” Pentagon efforts to prey on desperate young people.

The Biden administration announcement of so-called student loan debt relief does little to alleviate the problem it claims to solve.

The basic justification of every policy of the West is the ideology of ecumenism the West is projecting, full of complacency and arrogance. However, it is a false ecumenism, as it corresponds only to the narrow interests of the Western ruling classes, not the interests of humanity, writes Valdai Club expert Dimitris Konstantakopoulos. This article was written as a follow-up to the author’s presentation at the expert discussion “The Global Ideological and Spiritual Landscape and Russia’s Place on the New Values Map of the World”.

Industrialist Barre Seid funded a new dark money group run by Trump judicial adviser Leonard Leo, who helped eliminate federal abortion rights.

Coinbase recently filed its interim financial report. It makes pretty grim reading. A quarterly net loss of over $1bn, net cash drain of £4.6bn in 6 months, fair value losses of over 600k…

The recent reporting on the Uber Files—a series of 124,000 communications, dated from 2013 until 2017, that Mark McGann, one of Uber’s top lobbyists, leaked to The Guardian—has shed light on the company’s strategies to gain global prominence during its nascent years.