Subjects Archives: Financialization

“Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English.  We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history.   Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we put […]

“Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English.  We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history.   Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we put […]

  “Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English.  We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history.   Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we […]

Part of the right wing routinely blames undocumented immigrants for just about everything.  On September 24, nine days after the financial meltdown started in earnest, the National Review Web site carried an article by columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin blaming “illegals” for the crisis and the subsequent bailout of the banks.  “The Mother of All […]

Since the second half of the 1990s, the internal public debt of the world’s developing countries has increased significantly.  This increase is now reaching alarming proportions in a number of middle-income countries.  While some very poor countries have not yet been affected, the historical trend indicates a continuing rise in the debt level for developing […]

Some of you may have been present at our meeting in this building in May this year, when I recalled what I had said to Lucien Goldman in Paris a few months before the historic French May 1968.  In contrast to the then prevailing perspective of “organized capitalism,” which was supposed to have successfully left […]

  金融危機是全球化資本主義的罩門？ 知名經濟學者阿敏專訪 Samir Amin: “It’ a monster, yes, it’s a monster, but it’s a monster which can be defeated also.  This pattern of globalization, this pattern of the exclusive rule of dominant capital, that is, of oligopolies, is not acceptable and is not accepted.  The breakdown is starting by the financial crisis, because financial […]

Today’s food and financial crises have, in tandem, triggered a new global land grab.  On the one hand, “food insecure” governments that rely on imports to feed their people are snatching up vast areas of farmland abroad for their own offshore food production.  On the other hand, food corporations and private investors, hungry for profits […]

The boardrooms and finance ministries of Seoul, Bangkok, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur are today filled with a fair degree of schadenfreude at America’s troubles.  Schadenfreude is not a very nice emotion; Theodor Adorno once defined it as “unanticipated delight in the sufferings of another.”  But asking Asia’s business and governing elites to repress shivers of […]

Bail Out Homeowners, Create Trust, and Unfreeze Credit Markets The bailout scheme imposed by the United States government misrepresents the ongoing credit crunch as a problem of illiquidity, i.e. lack of cash.  In reality, the problem is a lack of trust due to widespread insolvency in the financial market.  In such an environment of widespread […]

Six months ago the United States was already deep in a financial crisis — the roots of which were explained in this article.   Yet, the conditions now are several orders of magnitude worse and are affecting the entire world.  We are clearly in the midst of one of the great crises in the history […]

Far-reaching strategic debate is underway about how to respond to the global financial crisis, and indeed how the North’s problems can be tied into a broader critique of capitalism. The 2008 world financial meltdown has its roots in the neoliberal export-model (dominant in Africa since the Berg Report and onset of structural adjustment during the […]

Labor unions around the world have reacted to the financial crisis and the economic recession with words and actions reflecting their national experience, their political ideology, and their leaderships. Unions and workers have already seen the financial crisis and the growing recession result in the closing of plants and offices, in shorter workweeks, pay cuts, […]

For the last several months, headlines about the global financial crisis have regularly made the front pages of international newspapers.  Over this period, Europe and the US have come to realise that corporations are facing the worst economic crisis since the 1929 crash.  In South Africa, however, articles on the global crisis have tended to […]

The financial crisis does not skip over Israel.  The country that has been integrating itself in global capitalist markets in the last decades is once again seeing the ugliest side of capitalism, as the stock markets have dropped over a stunning 10 percent since the beginning of the month and the GDP growth forecast for […]

The current financial crisis in Iceland is of course part of and connected to the international upheaval, but it also has its domestic roots.  To put it briefly, for more than 17 years, we Icelanders have had a right-wing government led by the right-wing Independence Party in coalition with social democratic or center parties.  The […]

Don’t panic!  That’s the panicked cry of governments and central bankers around the world.  Meanwhile their behaviour shows that they expect a very, very deep recession. After repetition over more than a quarter of century — by mainstream economists, ministers, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund — neo-liberal platitudes have been forgotten.  Today, we […]

  Klassekampen: Is the credit crisis a symptom of overaccumulation of capital?  It seems to me that investments worldwide, but especially in the United States, were funneled into the traditionally “safe” housing market following the bursting of the dotcom-bubble.  This overinvestment in turn generated a new bubble, thus causing today’s havoc.  Is this correct? JBF: […]

The Financial Crisis Goes beyond Finance The crisis today in mortgage lending does not come as a surprise to me.  I discussed the build up to the crisis in a book published last year, The Confiscation of American Prosperity.1 The book describes more than three decades of concerted efforts to restructure the economy to respond […]

The Will Miller Lecture, University of Vermont, October 28, 2008 Like many people who do not live around here, and maybe some who do, I had not heard of Will Miller, so, on being invited to be part of the Will Miller Social Justice Lecture series, I went to the organization’s Web site and learned […]