The crisis is not relinquishing its grip on Europe. From autumn 2008 to early 2009 the world market experienced the deepest slump in economic output since the Second World War. This is a global crisis. Even in emerging economies like China, Brazil, or India economic growth declined and could not compensate for the recession [...]
István Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time: Socialism in the Twenty-First Century. Monthly Review Press 2008. By Tapani Lausti So Karl Marx is back. The international financial and economic crisis has sent a great number of people to bookshops to buy his most famous book Capital. Well, fine. Personally I would recommend István [...]
It isn’t over until it is over. Of course, we are referring to Europe and its version of 1984. We find it profound that the bankers, politicians and bureaucrats of Europe can do what they have done with a straight face. Investor had a haircut shoved down their throats and the ECB, the European [...]
No new jobs were added to the US workforce in August, fuelling fears that the world’s largest economy is heading back into recession. Analysts expected at least 75,000 new jobs to have been created in the US last month, but the figure came in at zero, sparking further falls on stock markets around the [...]
The nation state is once again proving its special usefulness as a vehicle for managing capitalist crisis. Partly, this follows from the renewal of Keynesian monetary and fiscal policies. Other key dimensions of state usefulness include its more direct provision of financial guarantees to private enterprises and its over-priced purchase of “toxic” assets (those [...]
The dirty little secret is that we never had a debt “crisis.” We had a jobs crisis. While Republicans were arguing about the faux “crisis” and the press and Obama joined them, we got a series of disturbing economic signals. Consumer confidence was down, manufacturing was off, May and June’s job numbers were pathetic. [...]
“The US to some extent lives in debt to the entire world. And that isn’t right.” The former head of Russia’s Central Bank has said that the US is to some extent Indebted to the entire world and that in a unipolar system which keeps pursuing globalization, this spells an inevitable collapse. By RT [...]
“It is a common theme” that the United States, which “only a few years ago was hailed to stride the world as a colossus with unparalleled power and unmatched appeal is in decline, ominously facing the prospect of its final decay,” Giacomo Chiozza writes in the current Political Science Quarterly. The theme is indeed [...]
We live in a globalized economy where Americans are consumers of the last resort and the dollar is still the safe haven for the planet’s hoarded surplus value. The new recession that the Republicans are engineering with such impunity will instantly put into doubt all three pillars of McWorld, each already shakier than generally imagined: [...]
While the advanced capitalist countries are hit by an acute crisis of recession and unemployment, the developing world is facing, apart from the fall-out of this crisis, an acute food crisis. Hunger afflicts the developing world today with a virulence not seen in decades. World food prices, not just in nominal but in real [...]