Subjects Archives: Financialization

There was a time when the International Monetary Fund’s “recommendations” on how to reorganize an economy were read, defended and executed as if they were a divine mandate.

The characterization of landlords as struggling families is central to the prevailing depoliticized view of housing.

JANET Yellen, the U.S. treasury secretary, has finally acknowledged what has been obvious to most people for quite some time, namely that the imposition of sanctions against countries that the U.S. is hostile to, runs the risk of jeopardizing the hegemony of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

The U.S. dollar is essential to U.S. global power projection. But in 2022, the dollar share of reserve currencies slid 10 times faster than the average in the past two decades.

If you want to win back the trust of people, you have to protect them from the excesses of the financial world.

Most relationships undergo transition with the passage of time from appreciation of each other to a “state of having,” a desire to possess or even to control the other. But the present pivotal moment in the Russian-Indian relationship shows that an equal relationship does not fall into that trap.

According to SIPRI, global military spending will reach a new record high of $2,240 billion in 2022.

GOVERNMENT officials never tire of repeating that India is currently the fastest growing major economy in the world.

New data show the wealthiest Americans have stashed $2 trillion in offshore tax havens, as the government relaxes efforts to combat tax evasion.

Matthew Goodwin wants us to worry about a ‘new elite’ of media workers and academics, not the actual elite of billionaires—like his backers. SOLOMON HUGHES unveils the trail.

The new chief of the BRICS bloc’s New Development Bank, Brazil’s leftist ex-President Dilma Rousseff, revealed they are gradually moving away from the U.S. dollar, promising at least 30% of loans in local currencies of members.

Remarkably, during her visit to Ghana in late March 2023, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the US Treasury Department’s Office of Technical Assistance will ‘deploy a full-time resident advisor in 2023 to Accra to assist the Ministry of Finance in developing and executing medium- to long-term reforms needed to improve debt sustainability and support a competitive, dynamic government debt market’.

Hersh says the CIA estimates at least $400 million was embezzled last year in funds earmarked for diesel payments.

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.