Subjects Archives: Financialization

A scheme proposed by the European Commission will allow EU companies to pay for Russian gas in rubles without violating EU sanctions.

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR: Once deemed a basic human needs success story, Sri Lanka (SL) is now in its worst economic crisis since independence in 1948. Nonetheless, SL’s ‘moment of truth’ now offers lessons for other developing countries.

“Two bills of spending that are more than $4 trillion. And we’re going to pretend that this is going to have no effect on jobs? No effect on inflation?” – Charles Lanes

In early March, Argentina’s government came to an agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on a $45 billion deal to shore up its shaky finances. This deal was motivated by the government’s need to pay a $2.8 billion instalment on a $57 billion IMF stand-by loan taken out under former President Mauricio Macri in 2018.

In addition to today’s fuel and energy crises, food insecurity has been a major issue for a number of reasons and, with the current Russian-Ukrainian war, a global food crisis and hunger is a real risk. Unfortunately, this may pave the way for a kind of food diplomacy and food wars.

Everyone knows that inflation in the United States is increasing. Anyone who has read the news, or for that matter has gone shopping lately. Prices are rising at the fastest rate in decades. The Consumer Price Index rose 8.6 percent in March, which is the highest rate of increase since December 1981 (when it was 8.9 percent).

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has overwhelmingly approved a new measure designed to impose sanctions on Ethiopia. Known as the Ethiopia Peace and Stabilization Act of 2022, the bill authorizes the U.S. government to suspend financial and security assistance to Ethiopia and to sanction individuals the United States decrees to be responsible for the ongoing conflict in the country.

On Monday, President Joe Biden unveiled his 2023 budget, calling for dramatically increased funding for war and the police while allocating all-too-little funding for social services. Out of the total $1.58 trillion of spending outlined in the budget, $813 billion is allocated to the military while $769 billion is allocated for non-military spending. This is a $31 billion increase in funding for the war machine.

The juggling which U.S. imperialism has to do to maintain its hegemony becomes more bizarre by the day. First, it kept needling Russia (“provoking the bear”) “on behalf of the western alliance” by expanding NATO to its very borders, knowing full well that Ukraine’s joining NATO would be totally unacceptable to Russia.

Zelensky justified the ban on mostly left and anti-NATO parties in the country by claiming that they had alleged links with Russia, despite the fact that most of these parties have publicly opposed Russian intervention.

The government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela maintained its willingness to resume its oil trade with countries such as the United States, and even those that belong to the European Union, but it has clearly outlined the diplomatic and political conditions necessary for any exchange to take place.

CounterSpin interview with Braxton Brewington on student loan debt.

Deletion needed to preserve big lie of an unprovoked Russian invasion

Biden, finally, has his foreign policy ‘success’: Europe is walling itself off from Russia, China, and the emerging integrated Asian market.

Towards the end of the first chapter of Das Kapital, after having established the validity of the labor theory of value, Marx has a section on the “Fetishism of Commodities”.

On Feb. 24, the day when Russia launched the military operation, U.S. wheat and corn futures rose by their daily trading limits while soybeans rose to the highest since 2012.

Marx’s first sentence in Capital Volume One is: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an “immense accumulation of commodities”, its unit being a single commodity.” (Moore and Aveling translation).

According to defenders of the status quo, the best response to our most serious problems is to let markets work their magic; government regulation of private business activity only makes things worse.

COVID-19 has exposed major long-term economic vulnerabilities. This malaise–including declining productivity growth–can be traced to the greater influence of finance in the real economy.

CounterSpin interview with Rakeen Mabud on supply chain breakdown.