Subjects Archives: Global Economic Crisis

The Chinese central bank’s decision last week to let the yuan depreciate, in three stages by almost 4 percent against the US dollar, was officially explained as a move towards greater market determination of its exchange rate.  Though this explanation pacified stock markets around the world, China’s devaluation of the currency portends a serious accentuation […]

  The Phenomenal Drain of Profits Beginning in the 1970s, Puerto Rico’s economy began to suffer a drain of profits, to the point where the measure of total income produced in the island, the Gross Domestic Product, began to separate dramatically from the measure of income that residents own, the Gross National Product or GNP. […]

Articles on income equality sometimes note that the U.S. economy hasn’t faced the current level of disparity since 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression.  There has been much less discussion of the responses to the issue back then, even though income inequality was a major concern for policymakers as the Depression deepened and […]

  We have to stop talking about Greece.  What must emerge from the calamity of SYRIZA-ANEL is a renewed call for democracy. There is a scene in the 1972 political satire The Candidate where Robert Redford looks at the camera and quietly says, “Politicians don’t talk, they make sounds.” For the past five years Greece […]

The Reserve Bank of India, as is to be expected, has been denying that its governor Raghuram Rajan had ever suggested that the world was facing the possibility of a 1930s-type Great Depression.  Members of the “global financial community” are not supposed to say such things; so even if Dr Rajan did, a denial was […]

  Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Below is the editorial in its June 2015 issue. — Ed. The essence of “free market” ideology is exposed clearly when the health of the human body is at issue.  When outcomes are determined on the basis of […]

“Vermont . . . is the only state with universal single-payer health coverage for its residents.” — James Fallows in The Atlantic, April 2014 For nearly four years, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin has been basking in the glow of press accolades like the one above.  Unfortunately, what was often misreported nationally as a done deal […]

Government austerity for the masses (raising taxes and cutting public services) is becoming the issue shaping politics in western Europe, north America, and Japan.  In the US, austerity turned millions away from the polls where before they supported an Obama who promised changes from such policies.  So Republicans will control Congress and conflicts over austerity […]

Recent experiences suggest that the generations-old practice of collective bargaining as the normal, if not dominant, method of negotiating the terms of unionized employment is losing its legitimacy.  Notoriously, upon taking office in January 2010, Wisconsin’s Governor Walker introduced a bill to strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights.  Despite a massive upheaval and […]

Thomas Piketty.  Capital in the Twenty-First Century.  Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.  $39.95. Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty has caused a stir, which it deserves.  Capital 21, as we will abbreviate the title, grapples with a prominent current issue: outrageously unequal incomes and wealth.  It is a data-rich, […]

Larry Summers and Paul Krugman have recently identified the phenomenon of stagnation.  Given that they are giants in today’s economic policy conversation, their views have naturally received enormous attention.  That attention is very welcome because the issue is so important.  However, there is also a danger that their dominance risks crowding out other explanations of […]

Is there a fundamental conflict between a healthy environment and a healthy economy? There has been a lot of concern lately about damage that we humans are inflicting on our small, beautiful Planet Earth.  Waste CO2 from our way of life has been dissolving in the oceans, increasing the acidity of the water and making […]

  John Bellamy Foster is best-known as author of Marx’s Ecology (2000; in which he corrects the popular misapprehension that Marx did not ‘get’ environmental limits), and as editor of Monthly Review (monthlyreview.org), the journal founded by Marxist economist Paul Sweezy in the late 1940s.  In his latest book, The Endless Crisis (2012; written with […]

The political calculus behind immigration reform was supposed to have changed after the elections of 2012.  The outcome of the elections, along with some basic economics, was supposed to have made the logic of legalization all but inevitable, setting the stage for the passage of comprehensive immigration reform early this year. And yet, we remain […]

Labor historians Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh have vividly described how sailors and other maritime workers were in the vanguard of the creation of an international working class.  Unlike most people in the early modern period who largely stayed rooted to the soil of their birth or tied closely to their particular artisanal enterprises, Jack […]

  Rebekah Wetmore and Ryan Romard (RW/RR): The crisis of world capitalism starting in 2007 was the most severe crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression and thus far the recovery, both globally and within Canada, has been weak at best.  With this mind, to what extent is the current crisis cyclical and in what […]

On 27 October, 2012, Gennady Zyuganov gave a rather important speech.  Presented at the 14th plenum of the central committee, it sought to provide the framework for renewing and improving the theoretical work of the party.  But this is not any party and Zyuganov is not any leader, for the party is the Russian Communist […]

With signs of a global economic downturn mounting, US aggression across the Middle East and North Africa ratchets up.  Once again, US imperialism stands poised to open the gates of Hell. According to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook report released last week, the “risks for a serious global slowdown are alarmingly high.”  The report projects […]

The Occupy movement forced the issue of economic inequality into American political discourse. The most common diagnosis, which comes from mainstream economics, is that inequality has risen over the last 40 years because technical change, notably computers and the Internet, has favored highly-educated workers and left lower-skilled workers behind.  The cure is to increase education […]

  Spring 2012.  Merkel and Sarkozy rush from summit meeting to summit meeting, in order to save the euro.  The yellow press smears the people of Greece.  The struggle over a solution to the crisis is intensifying dramatically: by early 2013, an authoritarian-neoliberal alliance of business lobby groups, the financial industry, the EU Commission, the […]