Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
The world economy is mired in a crisis of stagflation not seen since the 1970s. Economies are slowing or in recession, central banks are jacking up interest rates in an attempt to control inflation, and workers and oppressed people are yet again bearing the cost of the crisis and alleged (...)
Zhu Jun from the People’s Bank of China says the risk is small, but the world must be alert to the threat. Economies around the world have been hit by the measures taken to stop the spread of Covid-19.
China’s central bank has warned the international community to be alert to the risk of a (...)
In a Le Monde op-ed, economist Cédric Durand and sociologist Razmig Keucheyan argue that underinvestment in hospitals, the fragilities of globalization, support for banks rather than wages, and the oil price war, have combined to trigger the current crisis
The chain of events that the world (...)
We are witnessing a big crisis in the stock markets of the Wall Street, Europe, Japan and Shanghai, and many blame the coronavirus for it. In the last week of February 2020, the worst week since October 2008, the Dow Jones fell 12.4%, the S&P 500 fell 11.5% and the Nasdaq Composite fell (...)
After their 1944 birth at a New Hampshire hotel, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank turned 75 years old this year, long past a reasonable retirement age. For the sake of global financial management, most reformers’ hopes rest in changing the character of the Bretton Woods (...)
While some economists claim that the world economy is heading towards long-term stagnation, others claim that what we are seeing is a short cycle. Analysts of the world economy are divided between those who foresee a recession and those who think it is just a question of controlling a slowdown. (...)
Ten years after the bankruptcy of Lehmann Brothers, more and more analyses are being produced centring on two questions: how did it happen? Can it happen again? But they are almost all centred on the workings of finance, past or future. The point of view adopted here is a little different, (...)
This is an edited version of a speech given at The World Transformed 2018 panel on 10 Years Since the Financial Crisis: Transforming the Global Economy, in Liverpool last month.
The panel at the World Transformed (l to r): Ann Pettifor, Raquel Rolnik, Grace Blakeley, Dorothy Grace Guerrero (...)
It is now clear that financial crises are not discrete events but are linked phenomena that have been unleashed on the globe ever since the financial markets were liberalized during the Reagan-Thatcher era in the early 1980’s. To take just the three most prominent crashes, surplus capital that (...)
Following the latest economic crisis and in discussions amongst comrades, the words overproduction/underconsumption crisis and overproduction in the sense of capitalism needing constant growth and accumulation to keep both profits and the rate of profits up are often conflated. The idea of (...)
Pete Green, Left Unity Economic Policy Commission convenor, reviews Bankocracy by Eric Toussaint, just published by Resistance Books and IIRE.
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As I was preparing this review a couple of items in the news caught my eye. One was that George Osborne in Brussels was (...)
There have a lot of great analyses and interpretations of the world and I won’t try to compete with them. I’ll say a few words about changing the world.
I don’t have any great success story to present, just a few thoughts about solving the old contradiction between jobs and the environment, in (...)
Since 2008, the Fed has granted unlimited credit to banks at an official rate of 0.25%. In fact, as the General Accounting Office (GAO) has revealed, the Fed has lent close to $16 trillion at an interest rate below 0.25%. [1] The report shows it has not followed its own prudential rules and (...)
We vividly remember how the collapse of Lehman Brothers almost destroyed the world financial system.
There was neither remembrance nor anamnesis of that horrible day which shook the financial world and brought it to its knees six years ago. On September 15, 2008, the world witnessed the (...)
The eurozone banks have the monopoly of lending to the public sector. It is prohibited for the ECB and the eurozone’s central banks to grant loans to public authorities (see box on the ECB). The governments in the eurozone have the possibility of borrowing from publicly owned banks where they (...)
Government aid is made up of guarantees, and injections of capital in order to recapitalize the banks. In the period from October 2008 to December 2011, €1,174 trillion (9.3% of EU GDP [1] ) worth of guarantees were underwritten by European Governments as a contingency measure. To these (...)
Summary: Since the banking bubble burst in 2007, the major Central Banks of the most industrialised countries lend massively to private banks at very low interest rates in order to avoid their failure, thus permitting the big banks that take the most advantage to save considerable amounts in (...)
Andrew Sernatinger and Tessa Echeverria
The Basel II accords were drafted at a time of neoliberal euphoria when capitalist bankers had obtained the cancellation of the few prudential rules that still remained from the 1930 Great Depression. Basel II coincided with Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, the US central bank, (...)
If a bank posts significant losses (a major corporation goes bankrupt and cannot pay back a loan, or more often, due to losses on financial products traded on the derivatives market, such as ABS-RMBS, and CDOs, in particular linked to the real estate crisis or bad bets on how the exchange rate (...)
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