We, the student and precarious workers of Europe, Tunisia, Japan, the US, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Peru and Argentina, met in Paris over the weekend of the 11th-13th of February, 2011 to discuss and organize a common network based on our common struggles. Students from Maghreb and Gambia tried to come but France refused them entry. […]
Subjects Archives: Financialization
The Great Recession and Its Aftermath: Causes vs. Symptoms
There is much confusion about the current economic situation, among left media and organizations as well as in the mainstream media. This is certainly understandable given its complexity. But what many are referring to as causes are symptoms of a deeper underlying problem — in other words, sparks that produced the Great Recession by igniting […]
Public Sector Squeeze
A national campaign is now fully launched to make local public sector employees pick up a major share of the costs of economic crisis. Years of rising spending and falling revenue have carved a path of destruction through federal, state, and local budgets. Deficits and debts have mounted, eroding taxpayer support for government spending […]
Online Calculator Estimates Retirement Income, Showing Importance of Social Security
In his State of the Union address, President Obama insisted on the need to protect Social Security and ensure that future generations can depend on it. Nevertheless, it appears that some in Congress are considering major changes to the program. Unfortunately, many people do not understand the program’s solvency or the likely importance that it […]
Income, Inequality, and Food Prices: A Critique of Broda, Leibtag, and Weinstein’s “The Role of Prices in Measuring the Poor’s Living Standards”
Introduction and Summary: In “The Role of Prices in Measuring the Poor’s Living Standards,” Christian Broda, Ephriam Leibtag, and David E. Weinstein (2009) use proprietary data — the 2005 Nielsen Homescan dataset — to analyze differences by income level in the prices paid for food. They find that Nielsen households with incomes above $60,000 pay […]
They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To! Why Even the Best Post-war Economist Ended Up a Tragic Figure
The Crash of 2008 and its ghastly aftermath was not just an economic crisis but also a crisis aided and abetted by economics. Previously I have written about the Econobubble (the handmaiden of the “real” Bubble) and the toxic theories of economists who were very recently rewarded with the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Following […]
Notes on Contemporary Imperialism
Phases of Imperialism Lenin dated the imperialist phase of capitalism, which he associated with monopoly capitalism, from the beginning of the twentieth century, when the process of centralization of capital had led to the emergence of monopoly in industry and among banks. The coming together (coalescence) of the capitals in these two spheres led to […]
Daniel Ellsberg: WikiLeaks Precursor and Unsung Foe of Neoliberal Economics
This is not the first time thousands of classified documents have been “liberated,” revealing to a stunned public how their government has waged a concerted war of disinformation against them for the purposes of bending their will to the demands of a pointless war: a war on the altar of which the deceived public are […]
Capitalism: An Obsolete System
Listen to the interview with Samir Amin: Can you tell me very briefly what your book Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism? is about? The title of my book is indicative of the intention. The title, in a provocative way, is Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism in Crisis? As […]
Latin American Lessons for the European Crisis: Interview with Michael A. Lebowitz
Michael A. Lebowitz will deliver the Fourth Annual Lecture in Memory of Nicos Poulantzas (“Building Socialism of the 21st Century: The Logic of the State”) on Wednesday, 8 December 2010, 7 PM, at the auditorium of the Goethe Institute (Omirou St. 14-16) in Athens, Greece. Mr. Lebowitz, is Marxism still relevant today? I ask […]
Haircuts: Estimating Investor Losses in Sovereign Debt Restructurings, 1998-2005
Table 14 summarizes the main technical characteristics of the debt restructurings studied in this paper: the size of the exchange, the participation rate, the numbers of instruments tendered and new instruments issued, the options available to investors, etc. Table 15 contains the main results, both in terms of the level and dispersion of NPV […]
Ireland vs Iceland
. . . The travails of the lands of Ire and Ice are not so much at odds with each other and come down essentially to the same point — the size of banking assets to that of the general economy; but they do differ considerably in how the two economies approached the battle. […]
Can We Afford Cost-Saving Efficiency?
So there are no technological fixes [to the environmental problem caused by increasing consumption] in sight? I’ve gone on from the basic footprint concept to demonstrate a couple of other interesting spin-offs. The assumption seems to be, in the mainstream, that improved technology, improved material and energy efficiency will help to solve this problem. […]
G-20 Barking Up the Wrong Tree
If the G-20 is going to be nothing more than a talking shop on economic issues, they ought to at least talk about the economic problems that really matter, and the ones that they can do something about. Not that currency values don’t matter — they are actually very important. And it is interesting to […]
On Deficit Commission Proposals
November 10, 2010 Senator Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles appeared to have largely ignored economic reality in developing the proposals they presented to the public today. The country is suffering from 9.6 percent unemployment with more than 25 million people unemployed, underemployed, or who have given up looking for work altogether. Tens of millions of […]
A Modest Proposal for Overcoming the Euro Crisis
It is now abundantly clear that each and every response by the eurozone (EZ) to the galloping sovereign debt crisis has been consistently underwhelming. This includes the joint EZ-IMF operation, back in May, to “rescue” Greece and, in short order, the quite remarkable overnight formation of a so-called “special vehicle” (officially the European Financial Stability […]
The Impact of Income Distribution on the Length of Retirement
Social Security has made it possible for the vast majority of workers to enjoy a period of retirement in at least modest comfort without relying on their children for support. The average length of retirement has increased consistently since the program was started in 1937. However, the increase in the normal retirement age from 65 […]
The Econobubble Revisited
In a recent article, I discussed the 2010 Economics Nobel Prize in rather unflattering terms. However, nothing beats the decision to award the 1997 Economics Nobel to Robert Merton and Myron Scholes for developing “a pioneering formula for the valuation of stock options.” “Their methodology,” trumpeted the Nobel committee, “has paved the way for economic […]
G20: The United States and Neo-mercantilism
Here comes the travail of crisis. The more they talk about coordination, the more it becomes necessary to concentrate on the conflicts revealed by the very talk of coordination. The G20 finance ministers’ meeting, held in South Korea on Friday, has already been mortgaged by the case opened by US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner regarding […]
Playing the Currency Blame Game
The slanging match over currency and monetary policies at the annual Fund-Bank meetings, held over the second weekend of October, points to the disarray in global economic governance. While the US sought to mobilise IMF support for an effort to realign exchange rates and ensure an appreciation of the renminbi in the wake of China’s […]
