Subjects Archives: Financialization

Before the pandemic was announced by the World Health Organisation in March 2020, the poorer nations of the world already struggled with seriously high—and unpayable—levels of debt.

It is now time to react concerning the issue of debt cancellations and repudiations.

“The Party Is Ending for French Retirees.” That’s the headline the Wall Street Journal (3/14/23) went with just days before French President Emmanuel Macron invoked a special article of the constitution to bypass the National Assembly and enshrine an increase in the retirement age in national law.

Only an ecosocialist revolution can stop our demise, but capitalism’s behemoth keeps people deceitful and mostly unaware of being on the verge of a catastrophic end. We must arise—now!

In this reprise from October 1993, Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy ask: “Isn’t there anyone around here who understands how this capitalist system works?”

Bank stock prices have stabilized at the start of this week. And all the key officials at the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury and the European Central Bank are reassuring investors that the crisis is over.

Remember Ajit Pai, the former Verizon lawyer Trump put in charge of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)? When he gutted net neutrality rules and kneecapped the agency’s ability to regulate telecom monopolies, voters from across the political spectrum were outraged. The internet erupted in protest.

The White House released its budget request for 2024. For the Pentagon, there is $824 billion. Adding armaments for military operations in Ukraine takes that figure to more than $950 billion.

The U.S. is divesting from working people and investing in banks and venture capitalists, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

As a result of military aid from the U.S. and many European states, Ukraine became the 3rd biggest importer of major arms during 2022.

Economist Michael Hudson responds to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Silvergate, and explains the similarities with the 2008 financial crash and the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s.

In an exclusive interview with The Cradle, Russia’s top macroeconomics strategist criticizes Moscow’s slow pace of financial reform and warns there will be no new global currency without Beijing.

Silicon Valley Bank, the 16th largest in the U.S., was shut down on March 10 and put under the control of the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation.

U.S. President Joe Biden is a self-confessed Catholic. He regularly attends the religious services of his congregation and, like every U.S. president, he has sworn to his office by placing his hand on the bible. Therefore, it is safe to say that he is aware of the negative moral charge that the word “hell” has among his people.

When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million in 2013, he didn’t transform it into a paper that elevated the perspectives of the wealthy elite—it had already been that for decades.

Ecuadorian economist and former presidential candidate Andrés Arauz explains Latin America’s attempt to create a new currency and regional financial architecture, to challenge the “hegemonic, neo-colonial” U.S. dollar-dominated system..

Americans are growing weary of the US support for Ukraine, a new poll suggests.

Indian economist Amartya Sen has posed a devastating challenge to the dominant capitalist understanding of development. But Sen’s own analytical framework doesn’t go far enough in exposing the inherently exploitative logic of capitalism.

The German Democratic Republic (DDR) was a socialist state founded in East Germany in 1949 as a democratic, antifascist reaction to the Second World War and the subsequent restoration of monopoly capitalism in West Germany.

Citing four sources with knowledge of the matter, Reuters reports that Indian refiners and traders embarked on paying for most of their Russian oil purchased via Dubai-based traders in UAE dirhams instead of U.S. dollars.