This is not the first time thousands of classified documents have been “liberated,” revealing to a stunned public how their government has waged a concerted war of disinformation against them for the purposes of bending their will to the demands of a pointless war: a war on the altar of which the deceived public are […]
Subjects Archives: Political Economy
Capitalism: An Obsolete System
Listen to the interview with Samir Amin: Can you tell me very briefly what your book Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism? is about? The title of my book is indicative of the intention. The title, in a provocative way, is Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism in Crisis? As […]
A Transfer of National Debt to the ECB and a European New Deal
Summary Cutting debt, deficits and wages poses a major crisis for both European governments and the European project. The ETUC calls for a twin strategy to stabilise the current crisis by (1) transferring a major share of national debt to the ECB and for (2) net European bond issues to finance the European Economic […]
Latin American Lessons for the European Crisis: Interview with Michael A. Lebowitz
Michael A. Lebowitz will deliver the Fourth Annual Lecture in Memory of Nicos Poulantzas (“Building Socialism of the 21st Century: The Logic of the State”) on Wednesday, 8 December 2010, 7 PM, at the auditorium of the Goethe Institute (Omirou St. 14-16) in Athens, Greece. Mr. Lebowitz, is Marxism still relevant today? I ask […]
The College Conundrum: Why the Benefits of a College Education May Not Be So Clear, Especially to Men
Excerpt (Endnotes Omitted): At least since the early 1990s, the share of young people earning a four-year college degree has not increased as quickly as many economists would like. A higher share of young people today have college degrees than at any point in our nation’s history, yet many economists remain concerned that the […]
If China Wants to Pay for Our Vacations, Should We Let Them?
Trade disputes with China have been heating up lately, but there really is no reason for the hostility. Essentially the dispute boils down to the fact that China wants to subsidize the consumption of people in the United States and elsewhere, by propping up the value of the dollar. This is raising objections from the […]
The Crisis and Obama’s Decline
The economic crisis that Obama rode to victory in 2008 also rode him down in the 2010 elections. Obama and his economic advisors badly “mismanaged the crisis.” While the Obama team seems to have learned little from its failure, we need to draw its lessons if we are to reduce the costly social consequences of […]
Ireland: “We Can’t Pay That Money, and We Won’t Pay That Money”
Outside the General Post Office, Dublin, Ireland, 27.11.10 “Well, our gallant allies in Europe have arrived 95 years too late and uninvited, and instead of guns to help the revolution they have brought economic weapons of mass destruction. Does anybody in this country or in Dáil Éireann think that we can as a people […]
The Spectre of Default in Europe
Default, Debt Renegotiation and Exit When the Eurozone crisis burst out in early 2010, an RMF report identified three strategic options for peripheral countries, namely, first, austerity imposed by the core and transferring the costs of adjustment onto society at large, second, broad structural reform of the Eurozone in favour of labour and, third, exit […]
“Keep Negotiating Firmly with Private Creditors”
Some time before the offer [at the meetings with the IMF and the WB in Dubai on 22 September 2003], [Argentine Economy Minister Roberto] Lavagna was already preparing the ground: he realized that after the offer “there are going to be sad faces everywhere.” And indeed the first reaction of the creditors was rejection. […]
Haircuts: Estimating Investor Losses in Sovereign Debt Restructurings, 1998-2005
Table 14 summarizes the main technical characteristics of the debt restructurings studied in this paper: the size of the exchange, the participation rate, the numbers of instruments tendered and new instruments issued, the options available to investors, etc. Table 15 contains the main results, both in terms of the level and dispersion of NPV […]
Noam Chomsky on Hopes and Prospects for Activism: “We Can Achieve a Lot”
Acclaimed philosopher and activist Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He shared his perspectives on international affairs, economics, and other themes in an interview conducted at his office in Boston on September 14, 2010. Keane Bhatt: Your new book Hopes and Prospects begins with the story of […]
Ireland vs Iceland
. . . The travails of the lands of Ire and Ice are not so much at odds with each other and come down essentially to the same point — the size of banking assets to that of the general economy; but they do differ considerably in how the two economies approached the battle. […]
The Value of Money
Paul Jay: On November 7, the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, issued a statement calling for the reintroduction of some form of gold standard to establish the value of money. Why now? . . . Is Robert Zoellick’s proposal grasping at straws? Jane D’Arista: Well, what you’re saying is quite right. The […]
Where’s the Growth Supposed to Come From?
Have governments everywhere simply lost their marbles? Not much emerged from the Seoul G-20 Summit — and definitely not anything really desirable in the form of coordinated Global Keynesian policies (of the kind that Matías Vernengo has advocated in the TripleCrisis blog). But then, quite frankly, not much was really expected to come out, given […]
On Paul Baran’s Political Economy of Growth
In underdeveloped countries the appropriation of the economic surplus by foreign capital or its absorption by nonessential consumption of the parasitic upper classes is emphasized, the repercussions being a low level of investment and slow economic growth.
Let’s Launch an Enquiry into the Debt! A Manual on How to Organise Audits on Third World Debts
Excerpt: The first objective of an audit is to clarify the past, to untangle the web of debt, thread by thread, so as to reconstruct the sequence of events which has led to the present impasse. . . . Who has loaned and what was his role? How did the State find itself committed, […]
Can We Afford Cost-Saving Efficiency?
So there are no technological fixes [to the environmental problem caused by increasing consumption] in sight? I’ve gone on from the basic footprint concept to demonstrate a couple of other interesting spin-offs. The assumption seems to be, in the mainstream, that improved technology, improved material and energy efficiency will help to solve this problem. […]
Emerging Markets Confront QE2: Capital Controls, Reserve Accumulation, or Both?
Paul Jay: You recently wrote a piece in the Guardian. The title is “Who Pays the Bill for the Fed’s QE2? By Depressing US Interest Rates, Quantitative Easing Forces Developing Countries to Defend Their Currencies at Crippling Cost.” What do you mean by that? Kevin P. Gallagher: One of the unintended effects of QE2 […]
G-20 Barking Up the Wrong Tree
If the G-20 is going to be nothing more than a talking shop on economic issues, they ought to at least talk about the economic problems that really matter, and the ones that they can do something about. Not that currency values don’t matter — they are actually very important. And it is interesting to […]
