Subjects Archives: Financialization

Fossil fuel firm’s profits are ‘an insult to families struggling to get by,’ TUC says.

Pivotal economic crises frequently evoke multiple explanations that are all correct while missing the point.

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR. Colonial-style currency board arrangements have enabled continuing imperialist exploitation decades after the end of formal colonial rule. Such neo-colonial monetary systems persist despite modest reforms.

The Western strategy to weaken Russia backfires on Europe.

The value of the federal minimum wage has reached its lowest point in 66 years, according to an EPI analysis of recently released Consumer Price Index (CPI) data.

India will have to respond by increasing interest rates further sooner rather than later. Higher U.S. interest rates make global capital abandon other countries and rush to American bonds whose market yields have doubled at the shorter end.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is claiming that just because the U.S. GDP report is negative, it does not mean the world’s largest economy is in recession, a claim that has no economic foundations whatsoever.

The major economies are moving closer to recession, if they are not already there; and yet inflation rates continue to rise (for now). 

So, is this the moment of collapse in the Chinese model of development and the end of all that talk about ‘moving towards socialism’ etc? Many Western experts think so.

It’s because of decades of public investment that the company, and our national airports system, exist in the first place.

The unthinkable is happening for the second time in five months: Russian gas giant Gazprom writes to German gas companies announcing force majeure effective from June 14, exonerating it from any compensation for shortfalls since then. 

Today the federal minimum wage is $7.25! Let that sad fact sink in. Right now you can barely buy a gallon of gas in some parts of the country with that little cash.

The devastating effects of global warming are being felt by billions of people all around the world. Meanwhile, capitalist fat cats are openly downplaying the risk of entire cities being buried beneath the rising oceans as a trifling inconvenience. Like Emperor Nero before them, the rulers of this destructive system are fiddling–this time–as Rome drowns.

I just read this NYT column by Bryan Stryker, on how Democrats can win back the working class. I have no idea how its proposals poll, but as an economic matter, they will do little to help the working class.

Over the last year, real average weekly earnings fell 3.9% as inflation outpaced pay raises and average weekly hours fell by almost an hour.

In wars like the present one, politics on the home front cannot be permitted to give aid and comfort to the enemy. In the U.S. and NATO campaign, the Russian oligarchs and their businesses are targets and also weapons of the plan for regime change in the Kremlin.

That’s what’s different this time: Stuff blows up because of leverage and cascades through the crypto space because everything’s interconnected.

In this third part of my series on the future of work, I want to deal with the impact of automation, in particular robots and artificial intelligence (AI) on jobs. I have covered this issue of the relationship between human labour and machines before, including robots and AI.  But is there anything new that we can find after the COVID slump?

On July 1 at the White House, U.S. President Joe Biden made a startling disclosure that “the idea we’re going to be able to click a switch, bring down the cost of gasoline, is not likely in the near term.”

Whether the Fed can succeed in taming inflation and do so without precipitating a recession remains to be seen but is highly unlikely.