Subjects Archives: Financialization

In this exclusive interview, a prominent Indian intellectual examines how imperialism operates in our time and proposes specific forms of solidarity with Venezuela.

While online audiences know YouTube comedian Joanna Hausmann from her videos making the case for regime change, her economist father has flown below the radar. His record holds the key to understanding what the U.S. wants in Venezuela.

The Great Recession of 2008 marked the end of a lengthy period of international economic growth and rapidly increasing international trade. Now, some ten years later, economic activity, including trade and foreign direct investment, remains far below pre-crisis levels with little sign of revival.

Trump has repeatedly refused to rule out a military option.

Historically, capitalism develops institutions and ideologies that justify surplus extraction and capital accumulation. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the financialization of capitalism initiated a new era of accumulation which is known in academic contexts as finance-capital-driven neoliberalism.

On this episode, Scott Ferguson and Maxximilian Seijo speak with Mell about these and other connections that may be drawn between her own and neochartalism’s critical projects.

It’s now official: workers around the world are falling behind. The International Labor Organization’s (ILO) latest Global Wage Report finds that, excluding China, real (inflation-adjusted) wages grew at an annual rate of just 1.1% in 2017, down from 1.8% in 2016. That is the slowest pace since 2008.

No matter how we measure it, most Americans are falling further and further behind the tiny group at the top.

With what author and activist Naomi Klein calls “galloping momentum,” the “Green New Deal” promoted by Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., appears to be forging a political pathway for solving all of the ills of society and the planet in one fell swoop.

Whatever you may think of the multi-billionaire founders of Amazon and Alphabet-Google,⁽¹⁾ there would seem to be one undeniable fact about their companies: they have massively improved productivity. Amazon has an e-commerce system that delivers very efficiently; Google has revolutionised Internet search.

One of the central and most concrete themes that the break should cover concerns the way public indebtedness is used to justify austerity policies.

After fifteen years in the cold, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) returned to Argentina this May. President Mauricio Macri promised to attract foreign direct investment and to make his country the ‘supermarket of the world’. Instead, Argentina’s economy went into a tailspin. The IMF entered with its shop-worn prescriptions, a recipe that it has effectively sold for the past four decades: structural adjustment.

For six months, Argentina has been confronted with a new economic and social crisis on a massive scale. In the context the devaluation of local currency, rising inflation, and a deep recession, Mauricio Macri’s administration struck an agreement with the IMF, marking a major shift in the country’s future. The agreements slash public spending and prioritize the repayment of debt, among other measures. This dossier examines the different dimensions of the crisis, the open disputes, and the possibilities for the immediate future.

The rise of Donald Trump has brought talk of fascism to the forefront. While comparing U.S. Presidents to Hitler is certainly nothing new–both Obama and W. Bush were regularly characterized as such by their haters–Trump’s emergence on the national political scene comes at a very peculiar moment in U.S. history.

Organizing a union is no easy task in the United States. Although organizing a union is supposed to be a protected right, businesses regularly fire union supporters knowing that they face minimal punishment even if found guilty for their actions. In fact, the rights of all workers, regardless of their interest in unionization, are being whittled down. Simply put, U.S. law doesn’t work for workers.

Those aren’t my words. The quotation that forms the title of this post is from a recent Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis blog post.

Dominant corporations have dramatically increased their market power in the U.S. over the last decades, allowing them to boost their profits and, by extension, political power. And, although rarely acknowledged by the media, this trend owes much to the way public policy has promoted corporate intellectual property rights at the public expense.

If you look at headlines from the last year, ExxonMobil, Chevron and other major fossil fuel companies have seemingly turned a new page on climate change.

Last month, Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights (whose important work I have written about before), issued a tweet about the new poverty and healthcare numbers in the United States along with a challenge to the administration of Donald Trump (which in June decided to voluntarily remove itself from membership in the United Nations Human Rights Council after Alston issued a report on his 2017 mission to the United States).

The health-care industry overtook the retail sector as the nation’s largest employer in December, giving local economies and their workers a stake in the industry’s growth. Health jobs surpassed manufacturing jobs in 2008.