Tag global economy

Global Economic Report

By Brian Filed in Links, News Tagged with Argentina, Eurozone crisis, global economy, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, N+1 magazine, Naked Capitalism.com, The Economist, VoxEU.com November 3rd, 2011 @ 11:30 am

Last week, the markets soared when Merkel and Sarkozy announced a debt deal for Greece. This week, everything is back in the shitter because the president of Greece has called their bluff by putting the deal to a vote from the Greek public. Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has posted a very good roundup of the situation featuring plenty of links to serious analysis and commentary.

The general feeling is that depending on how things go in Greece, Italy is likely to implode next, regardless of whether or not Silvio Berlusconi released his latest CD of love songs. The Economist’s Free Exchange blog has a short consideration of the likely scenarios.

Gabriel O’Malley’s “Letter From Dublin” in the latest N+1 magazine looks at the collapse last year of the long-standing Fianna Fail government in the wake of Ireland’s debt deal with the EU and the unlikely upswing in the country’s situation over the last year.

At VoxEU.org, Icelandic economics professor and member of that country’s new constitutional commission Thorvaldur Gylfason recently wrote about the political upheaval in Iceland and the groundbreaking move to scrap the entire political system and rewrite the constitution, while telling the EU and the IMF to shove it.

And one more Naked Capitalism link: Yves Smith on another global financial rebel, Argentina, which also walked away from the IMF’s punitive austerity plans, opted for government stimulus, and presently has a growth rate of 8%.

Capitalism Destroys Everything

By Brian Filed in Links, Misc Tagged with capitalism destroys everything, Communism, global economy, karl marx, marxism September 9th, 2011 @ 11:34 am

This BBC News magazine article by John Gray offers the opinion that while Karl Marx misjudged how his own communist theory would work in reality, he was dead on in his critique of capitalism. Gray writes:

Capitalism has been described as a process of creative destruction, and no-one can deny that it has been prodigiously productive. Practically anyone who is alive in Britain today has a higher real income than they would have had if capitalism had never existed.

The trouble is that among the things that have been destroyed in the process is the way of life on which capitalism in the past depended.

He argues that the very success of capitalism is the agent of its own destruction as it now wreaks havoc on the middle class it depends on to flourish. Marx argued that the communism would eventually bring about the end of the bourgeoisie, but in practice the bourgeoisie could not be wiped away by the forces of communist regimes, it took the forces of the rapacious market.

Writing at his blog “Global Guerillas”, author and social theorist John Robb had a post entitled “Hollow States and a Crisis of Capitalism” that echoes some of the same ideas. Robb says that capitalism has resulted in nation states rotting from the inside out as they lurch from crisis to crisis:

The other idea I’m currently working on is: “a crisis of capitalism.” It may also take 3-4 years for people to really get that it is real.

The idea is simple. That capitalism, as it works today is failing. It lunges from crisis to crisis, each with increasing severity and duration. Ceteris paribus, we are headed for a decade long economic depression.

Why is it failing? Its decision making is EXTREMELY centralized. Centralized economic deicison making (aka “central planning”), as the Soviet nomenklatura found out, doesn’t work in a complex modern economy.

Now, the notion that capitalist economies are centralized seems opposite of the way we have been led to think of the difference between capitalism and communism, but he points out that most economic policy in the West is made by an extremely small group of elites who have become ossified by their own ideology and the hollowing out of political institutions that might otherwise counterbalance them.

Well And Truly Fucked

By Brian Filed in News, Politics Tagged with American politics, British politics, economic crisis, G20, global economy, Joseph Stiglitz, Naomi Klein, Paul Krugman, recession June 29th, 2010 @ 9:58 am

Line ‘em up, take their pictures, and then somebody PLEASE get rid of these motherfuckers, each and every one. Over the weekend, they all sat down and guaranteed that anyone who hadn’t been fleeced in the Bank Crisis of 2008 would get fleeced in the Double-Dip Recession of 2010…all except the bankers, of course, who continue to rob the industrialized world blind with the silent approval of these assholes (in return, I’m sure, for a few crumbs from the bankers’ tables). They all nodded their heads about reining in deficits by slashing desperately needed economic stimulus, even as the U.S. prepares to waste another $33 billion on Afghanistan.

At least they had the decency not to be photographed in silly costumes this time, The wall of black-suited men (pace Angela Merkel) is appropriately funerary for the death sentence they all signed off on.

A selection of news articles and op-eds:

Paul Krugman has already come up with a name for what is about to happen to us all: “The Third Depression”
Naomi Klein, writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail, reminds us how the original G7 came to be expanded into the G20 in the first place as brainchild of Larry Summers and Canadian finance minister Paul Martin while they were setting up the conditions that caused all this mess a decade ago
Economist Joseph Stiglitz, who was the guy who first sounded the alarm back in 2008, wrote this op-ed in the British newspaper The Independent over the weekend about the new Tory-LibDem government’s austerity budget and how it will devastate the weakest segments of British society.
Economist and member of Parliament Robert Skidelsky posted this article about Keynesian economic ideas and social democracy on the commentary site Project-Syndicate.org, which puts a little context on the current situation and also tries to separate traditional notions of Keynesian economics from the ideological blinders of the current debate.
Meanwhile, on the right…Tory cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith wants Britons to “move where the jobs are” (do you suppose he means China or India?), conservative blowhard George Will said that unemployment benefits are a subsidy for lazy bastards, and the international business editor of the London Telegraph opined that “The only plausible escape route for the West is a decade of fiscal austerity offset by helicopter drops of printed money, for as long as it takes.” You know, like Zimbabwe.

The New Gilded Age

By Brian Filed in Blogs Tagged with 19th century, 21st century, China, excess, Gilded Age, global economy, wealth August 20th, 2007 @ 11:46 am

I think I came across this blog at random as I was mindlessly clicking the Stumble Upon button on my browser the other day, but I completely agree with the point he’s making about what’s going on in China as a harbinger of “the New Gilded Age”.

The Gilded Age of fin-de-siecle America was a time of unbridled capitalism, and, as a consequence a time of immense disparity in wealth. The rich were never so rich and the poor never so poor. Workers were slaves in all but name only, beholden to the immensely powerful owners of factories, mills, mines, and other engines of economic power. Somehow, as the 20th century replaced the 19th, a swell of reform in the form of progressive politics and politicians (most notably Theodore Roosevelt) brought to bear the power of governmental regulation to hack away at the most egregious excesses and abuses, and then later the labor movement itself was able to flourish and win further changes.

What we see in China right now is almost exactly analagous to the Gilded Age economic imbalance — when businesses are allowed to operate in unregulated environments, they will inevitably use any method that enhances profitability. It does not matter if that involves using poisonous materials, contaminated food products, or causing as much pollution as they want. Further, as the blogger’s follow-up post this morning adds, workers are treated badly, paid unfairly, and are inextricably tied to their employers.

It is important to look to China now especially, because it is China who will dominate the world economically in the 21st century. As their economy continues to overshadow and subsume our own, the pressure will continue to mount to meet their competition head-on. Setting aside their insane theocratic foreign policy for a moment, it is worth remembering that the Republican party continues to seek to push back the effects of regulation and reform and has been remarkably successful at it (in no small part because the Democratic party seeks the same goals). China today is not only a haunting reminder of our past, it is a remarkably clear and focused picture of what we can expect America to become once again. With the curtailments of our civil liberties taking root, and a national government operating entirely for the benefit of their corporate sponsors, our past is likely to be our future.

(Pretty good random find, too. I’m going to read this blog for a while, I think)

Tag global economy

Global Economic Report

Related Posts:

Capitalism Destroys Everything

Related Posts:

Well And Truly Fucked

Related Posts:

The New Gilded Age

Related Posts:

Latest Comments

Dredging Up The Past