Subjects Archives: Financialization

A series of measures in Congress’ annual omnibus spending bill show that Democrats have given up their fight to end the dark money era.

“In fact, Zelenskiy is far closer to Lenin than to George Washington. He is a dictator. He is a dangerous authoritarian who has used $100 billion in U.S. tax dollars to erect a one-party police state in Ukraine.” Who wrote this?  It is the opinion posted on Twitter by Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Russia Today TV network (since 2005) and the Sputnik news agency (since 2014).

In 2013, Edward Snowden’s leak of documents pertaining to the inner workings of National Security Agency (NSA) sparked international revelations about the reach and unaccountability of Washington’s international surveillance apparatus. One series of documents that remain understudied, however, concern similar activities orchestrated by the Canadian government.

THE fact that income and wealth inequalities have increased quite dramatically under the neo-liberal regime is beyond dispute. The empirical work by Piketty’s team bears out the increase in income inequality. They use income tax data to infer about the share of the top 1 per cent of the population of a country in its national income.

Despite FTX’s collapse, a lawsuit linked to the exchange’s investor is trying to force regulators to allow crypto into the retirement market.

THE post-second world war period had seen a spate of welfare state measures in the advanced capitalist countries, especially in Europe, in emulation of what the Soviet Union was effecting.

With the Federal Reserve pushing up interest rates, we appear headed for a new recession.

It is in vogue nowadays to describe the multifaceted and intertwined crises of capitalism without referring to capitalism itself. Obscure jargon of ‘overlapping emergencies’ and ‘polycrisis’ are brought up to describe the complexity of the situation, and they serve, with or without intention, to conceal the culprit, namely the totality of capitalist relations.

Reminiscent of Imperial Japan’s “Comfort Women,” the organized sex trade near U.S. bases in Korea involved horrendous human rights violations.

The ongoing plunder of Africa’s natural resources drained by capital flight is holding it back yet again. More African nations face protracted recessions amid mounting debt distress, rubbing salt into deep wounds from the past.

In the current calendar year an estimated $200 billion has already flown out of India which amounts to a third of India’s exchange reserves.

The demise of FTX, the fifth-biggest cryptocurrency exchange by trade volume in 2022, and the second-largest by holdings, has sent a wave of chaos through global financial markets.

FTX had some eye-opening connections to powerful entities and individuals around the world before it all came crashing down.

Increased consumption of ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) was associated with more than 10% of all-cause premature, preventable deaths in Brazil in 2019. That is the finding of a new peer-reviewed study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Developing countries have long been told to avoid borrowing from central banks (CBs) to finance government spending. Many have even legislated against CB financing of fiscal expenditure.

Seneca Lake’s picturesque setting belies its long history of conquest and extraction.

During the Second World War, the Canadian government appealed for Canadians to buy war bonds to fight fascism in Europe.

The story currently being peddle by the folks at Bloomberg [ht: ja] is that the American middle-class is currently suffering, as the enormous wealth they managed to accumulate during the past few years is now dwindling. And that crisis—the end of their “once-in-a-generation wealth boom”—is what they will take into the midterm elections.

Inflation, Imperialism & Worker Resistance

EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell confessed the West’s neoliberal economic model was “based on cheap energy coming from Russia,” “access to the big China market,” and low-paid Chinese workers. Europe has now lost that, and is thus in crisis.