Subjects Archives: Financialization

The Banque Nationale d’Haiti (BNH) was housed in a whitewashed, two-story colonial building at the corner of rues Ferou and Américaine in the downtown business district of Port-au-Prince.v

The early history of U.S. imperial banking and the internationalization of Wall Street began alongside the project of U.S. colonial expansion at the turn of the 19th century and ended amid the financial and economic crises of the 1930s.

The 190 countries that are members of the IMF are entitled to allowances in strong currencies which they do not have to pay back. This device is called Special Drawing Rights. To this we must add loans that the IMF can grant to a country calling for help. Loans must be repaid with interest and are tied to conditions that reinforce neoliberal policies.

Vaccine costs have pushed many developing countries to the end of the COVID-19 vaccination queue, with most low-income ones not even lining up. Worse, less vaccinated poor nations cannot afford fiscal efforts to provide relief or stimulate recovery, let alone achieve Agenda 2030.

A new report from the Costs of War Project makes staggering estimates for the human and financial costs of the global forever wars.

A wealth tax would raise badly-needed revenue. More importantly, it could reduce the fortunes—and power—of billionaires.

Criminologist Andrés Antillano examines a high-profile security operation to neutralize criminal activity in the Cota 905 district in July.

Criminologist Andrés Antillano looks at the causes of the transformation of Venezuela’s gangs.

This article summarizes the manuscript, “The Two-Employer Problem: Strategic Dilemmas at the Heart of the Tipped Wage Debate,” a co-winner of the 2021 Albert Szymanski-T.R. Young/Critical Sociology Marxist Sociology Graduate Student Paper Award.

Instead of a health system striving to provide universal healthcare, a fragmented, profit-driven market ‘non-system’ has emerged. The 1980s’ neo-liberal counter-revolution against the historic 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration is responsible.

Despite the announcements from the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that “everything is under control”, Turkey is experiencing one of the deepest crises in recent years. A conversation with Hasan Durkal.

Bourgeois pundits are alarmed by the Chinese government’s latest regulatory changes. A Wall Street Journal headline is typical: “China’s corporate crackdown is just getting started. Signs point to more tumult ahead.”

Joe Biden’s response to the earthquake was to put war hawk Samantha Power, who now heads USAID, in charge of U.S. relief efforts in Haiti.

Decades of public health cuts have quietly taken a huge human toll, now even more pronounced with the pandemic. Austerity programmes, by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, have forced countries to cut public spending, including health provisioning.

ON July 19, 1969, 14 major banks were nationalised in the country. Today, after 52 years there is some talk again of privatising the nationalised banks, which naturally raises the question: why were banks nationalised at all?

Canadian mining companies own $2.5 billion of Burkina Faso’s gold, and the country is one of the most poverty-stricken in Africa.

Over 40% of Black and Latinx households pay more than 30% of their income on rent, compared with 25% of white households.

On 25 February 2021, the Chinese government announced that extreme poverty had been abolished in China, a country of 1.4 billion people. This historic victory is a culmination of a seven-decade-long process that began with the Chinese Revolution of 1949.

Urban crime is the golden child of local media, as recent FAIR coverage (6/21/21) has shown. But as FAIR’s Julie Hollar recently noted, the amount of attention given to a topic does not always reflect the seriousness of the situation.

The first decades of the 21st century have been a gilded age for the world’s super-rich. While the mass of humanity has struggled through successive economic crises, accelerating climate and environmental breakdown and now a devastating global pandemic, the billionaire class’s wealth has piled up to ever more dizzying heights.