Subjects Archives: Political Economy

  Herman Rosenfeld is a member of the Canadian Socialist Project and the Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly, a new initiative aiming to reinvigorate working class and radical politics in the city.  He spoke to Tom Denning about the methods and activities of GTWA and the challenges it faces. Who initiated the GTWA, and with what […]

  The Republicans have successfully changed the main emphasis of the economic debate from job creation to deficit control.  Why the urgency for balanced budgets?  After all, this anemic “recovery” has set itself apart from all previous post-war turnarounds precisely by its manifest failure to generate jobs.  Economic growth needs to considerably exceed 3% per […]

  Financial crises are bad news for the status of the currency in which the turmoil is denominated, right? So the US-made financial crisis must be bad for the dollar, right? And especially so because of the expansive dollar monetary policy that has ensued, right? Ambiguity on What “Strong Currency” Means Several economists appear to […]

  It is very difficult to explain American politics to those who are not Americans and/or have not lived here long enough.  Add to that the confusion over basic economic principles, and it becomes almost impossible to explain the debt-ceiling debate to rational people. As noted by James Galbraith, this is not a fiscal crisis, […]

As the eurozone authorities move closer to accepting the inevitable Greek debt default/restructuring, there are some who have pointed to the Jamaican debt restructuring of last year as a model.  It’s hard to imagine a worse disaster for Greece.  It is worth a closer look at what has been done to Jamaica, not only as […]

  Rating Agency: “Don’t take it wrong, but some companies are paying me to come here to tell you that you have no future.” Juan Ramón Mora is a cartoonist in Barcelona.  This cartoon was first published in his blog on 14 July 2011 under a Creative Commons license.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | […]

  Excerpt: The mid-2000s marked the start of a trend of steeply rising commodity prices, accompanied by increasing volatility.  The prices of a wide range of commodities reached historic highs in nominal terms in 2008 before falling sharply in the wake of the financial and economic crisis.  Since mid-2009, and especially since the summer of […]

There was a time when global oil prices reflected changes in the real demand and supply of crude petroleum.  Of course, as with many other primary commodities, the changes in the market could be volatile, and so prices also fluctuated, sometimes sharply.  More than anything else, the global oil market was seen to reflect not […]

A is for Airstrike; B is for Barack Obama; C is for Capitalism.

There has been considerable discussion of basing the Social Security cost of living adjustment (COLA) on the Chained Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (C-CPI-U) as a “painless” way of generating large budget savings.  This view reflects serious confusion about what the switch to the C-CPI-U involves.  (The switch would also lead to higher […]

There is a pervasive view that growth under capitalism, though it may worsen poverty, even absolute poverty, to start with, eventually leads to a lowering of poverty.  The experience of the English Industrial Revolution is invoked in this context.  There has been a huge debate among economic historians about the impact of the Industrial Revolution […]

  Much of the discussion surrounding the Greek crisis revolves around the probability and implications of a sovereign default and on whether the introduction of a national currency (which, for simplicity, we could call the new drachma) would help pull the Greek economy out of recession (see for example Manasse 2011 on this site).  Less […]

  Default is not the dirty word that nobody wants to say.  Almost everybody now accepts that Greece will default.  Several people will prefer to use the euphemism of “re-profiling debts,” but we all know what it means.  The interesting thing is that at least some authors, like Martin Wolf in a recent Financial Times […]

  Much of the left has, mostly without debating it, coalesced around “jobs” as a unifying political demand.  The motivation for this is clear: one of the biggest problems the country faces is that there are 20 million people who are unsuccessfully seeking full time employment.  But while it may seem obvious that the solution […]

Iran’s biggest economic problem is the growing production slump at its factories and workshops.  For both workers and the business elite, Iran’s domestic industrial troubles are far more pressing — and generating far more public anxiety — than international sanctions. The biggest danger for Iran in 2011 is the combination of higher unemployment and inflation […]

The Crisis, especially in Europe, is all-consuming.  Every day our minds are hijacked by its latest twist.  Here in Athens, a general strike almost brought the government to its knees and has kick-started a process that will, inevitably, lead to what can only be described as regime change. While history is preparing the next regime […]

  In March 2011, a group of people from different political backgrounds took the initiative to demand the formation of an Audit Committee in Greece.  Academics, writers, artists, union representatives all over the world supported this initiative.  The Audit Committee will find which parts of the debt are odious or illegitimate and will prove that, […]

The anti-colonial struggle in the third world countries had brought together workers, peasants, agricultural labourers, artisans, middle class intellectuals, and even the national bourgeoisie into one camp, demanding decolonisation.  This was a reflection of the fact that colonialism, or imperialism (if one uses the term in an inclusive sense to refer to all stages of […]

  David A. Kideckel.  Getting By in Postsocialist Romania: Labor, the Body, and Working-Class Culture.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.  xii + 266 pp.  $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-34957-6; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-21940-4. During the last twenty years, Romanian mass media and most Romanian intellectuals have typically portrayed the miners of the Jiu Valley in Romania […]

Introduction There are seven key points about the national debt, budget and trade deficits, and the dollar, that the public needs to understand in order to be well-informed and prepared to choose among various policy options: 1) The national debt is not literally a generational transfer.  This is easy to see because everyone who holds […]