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Arabica Robusta

The Kamikaze Economics and Politics of Forcing Austerity on the Ukraine | New Economic ... - 0 views

neweconomicperspectives.org/...forcing-austerity-ukraine.html

economic adjustment crisis structural theory neoclassical social neoliberalism debt ukraine russia us intervention

shared by Arabica Robusta on 08 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • austerity dogma trumps – simultaneously – good economics, good domestic politics in the U.S. and the Ukraine, and U.S. national security.  That’s how insanely powerful the failed dogma of austerity has become.  The CEOs who run the banks that loan money to the Ukraine are more powerful than the Pentagon and our State Department.
Arabica Robusta

Eurodad.org - Conditionally yours: An analysis of the policy conditions attached to IMF... - 0 views

www.eurodad.org/conditionallyyours

economic adjustment crisis structural neoclassical theory social neoliberalism debt triple crisis

shared by Arabica Robusta on 05 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • The IMF claims to have limited its conditions to critical reforms agreed by recipient governments. However, the worrying findings of this research suggest that the IMF is going backwards – increasing the number of structural conditions that mandate policy changes per loan, and remaining heavily engaged in highly sensitive and political policy areas.
  • The biggest IMF facilities in terms of loan totals have the heaviest conditionality. This rise is driven by exceptionally high numbers of conditions in Cyprus, Greece and Jamaica, which together accounted for 87% of the total value of loans, with an average of 35 structural conditions per programme.
  • Almost all the countries were repeat borrowers from the IMF, suggesting that the IMF is propping up governments with unsustainable debt levels, not lending for temporary balance of payments problems – its true mandate.
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  • Other sensitive topics include requirements to reduce trade union rights, restructure and privatise public enterprises, and reduce minimum wage levels.
Arabica Robusta

David Harvey: the crisis of capitalism this time around | ROAR Magazine - 0 views

roarmag.org/...venteen-contradictions-excerpt

economic adjustment crisis structural neoclassical theory social neoliberalism debt harvey

shared by Arabica Robusta on 31 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The one big institutional difference this time around seems to be the role of the central banks, with the Federal Reserve of the United States playing a leading if not domineering role on the world stage. But ever since the inception of central banks (back in 1694 in the British case), their role has been to protect and bail out the bankers and not to take care of the well-being of the people.
  • But if everyone tries to live off rents and nobody invests in making anything, then plainly capitalism is headed towards a crisis of an entirely different sort.
  • What remains of the radical left now operates largely outside of any institutional or organised oppositional channels, in the hope that small-scale actions and local activism can ultimately add up to some kind of satisfactory macro alternative. This left, which strangely echoes a libertarian and even neoliberal ethic of anti-statism, is nurtured intellectually by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and all those who have reassembled postmodern fragmentations under the banner of a largely incomprehensible post-structuralism that favours identity politics and eschews class analysis.
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  • We need an open forum — a global assembly, as it were — to consider where capital is, where it might be going and what should be done about it. I hope that this brief book will contribute something to the debate.
  • something different in the way of investigative methods and mental conceptions is plainly needed in these barren intellectual times if we are to escape the current hiatus in economic thinking, policies and politics. After all, the economic engine of capitalism is plainly in much difficulty. It lurches between just spluttering along and threatening to grind to a halt or exploding episodically hither and thither without warning. Signs of danger abound at every turn in the midst of prospects of a plentiful life for everyone somewhere down the road. Nobody seems to have a coherent understanding of how, let alone why, capitalism is so troubled.
Arabica Robusta

Beginning of the end of the neoliberal approach to development | Global development | t... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...beral-development-book-extract

economic adjustment crisis structural theory neoclassical social neoliberalism debt grabel ha-joon chang

shared by Arabica Robusta on 29 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • So far, these demands have resulted in very modest agreements to change voting weights at the institution (and even these have not yet been ratified by the US). But we cannot help but conclude that IMF governance reform is now firmly on the agenda. Equally important, the current crisis has also marked a substantial curtailment in the geography of the institution's influence in the global south.
  • Just as the Asian crisis laid the groundwork for institutional developments that have deepened only in the current crisis, so do we expect the current crisis to catalyse further innovation along the lines already in place, and in directions not yet imagined, when the next period of instability emerges.
  • We should take note of what we see as the beginning of the end of the neoliberal approach to development. The process of discrediting that development model begins in the aftermath of the east Asian financial crisis of 1997–98.
Arabica Robusta

Another financial crisis looms if rich countries can't kick their addiction to cash inj... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...looms-addiction-cash-injection

financial crisis economic crisis change

shared by Arabica Robusta on 15 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • If its effects are at best debatable and at worst laying the ground for the next round of financial crises, why has there been so much QE? It is because it has been the only weapon that the rich country governments have been willing to deploy in order to generate an economic recovery.
  • QE has become the weapon of choice by these governments because it is the only way in which recovery – however slow and anaemic – could be generated without changing the economic model that has served the rich and powerful so well in the past three decades.
  • This model is propelled by a continuous generation of asset bubbles, fuelled by complex and opaque financial instruments created by highly leveraged banks and other financial institutions. It is a system in which short-term financial profits take precedence over long-term investments in productive capabilities, and over the quality of life of employees. If the rich countries had tried to generate recovery through any other means than QE, they would have to seriously challenge this model.
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  • Recovery driven by fiscal policy would have involved an increase in the shares of public investment and social welfare spending in national income, reducing the share going to the rich.
  • Recovery based on a "rebalancing" of the economy would have required policies that hurt the financial sector. The financial system would have to be re-engineered to channel more money into long-term investments that raise productivity. Exchange rates would have to be maintained at a competitive level on a permanent basis, rather than at an over-valued level that the financial sector favours.
  • There would have to be greater public investment in the training of scientists and engineers, and greater incentives for them to work in and with the industrial sector, thus shrinking the recruitment pool for the financial industry.
  • Given all this, it is not a big surprise that those who benefit from the status quo have persisted with QE. What is surprising is that they have actually strengthened the status quo, despite the mess they have caused. They have successfully pushed for cuts in government spending, shrinking the welfare state to the extent that even Margaret Thatcher could not manage. They have used the fear of unemployment in an environment of shrinking social safety nets to force workers to accept more unstable part-time jobs, less-secure contracts (zero-hour contracts being the most extreme example), and poorer working conditions.
  • Greece, Spain, and other eurozone periphery countries could explode any day, given their high unemployment and deepening strains of austerity. In the US, which is considered the home of quiescent workers, the call for living wages is becoming louder, as seen in the current strikes by fast-food restaurant workers.
  • All of these stirrings may amount to little, especially given the weakened state of trade unions, except in a few countries, and the failure of the parties on the left of centre to come up with a coherent alternative vision. But politics is unpredictable. Five years after the crisis, the real battle for the future of capitalism may be only just beginning.
Arabica Robusta

The Great Banking Divide » TripleCrisis - 0 views

triplecrisis.com/the-great-banking-divide

adjustment economic structural neoclassical theory crisis social neoliberalism brics

shared by Arabica Robusta on 26 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Consider what is happening in the most dynamic countries of developing Asia, where the increase in bank lending has been most evident since 2008. It turns out that a large part of the expansion in domestic credit has actually been directed to households, for consumption purposes. And the businesses that have gained from that (such as construction and real estate as well as some consumer durables) are the ones that have been disproportionately getting bank loans for their own productive activity.
  • The result has been an explosion in heavily leveraged consumption as well as in residential real estate activity,. And the impact has been most strongly felt in the housing market. So house prices increased rapidly between 2007 and 2011 – by around 70 per cent in China and Hong Kong China, and by 30-50 per cent in Taiwan China and Malaysia. Even economies where wage incomes barely increased, like South Korea, witnessed big increases in house prices.
  • There have been even larger increases in household debt than corporate debt in most of Asia – for automobiles, for student debt, for credit cards purchases, for other consumption based on EMIs.
Arabica Robusta

WTO Orders Sanctions Unless U.S. Cuts Consumer Labels, Disproving Obama TPP C... - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...-sanctions-unle_b_8748594.html

globalization trans-pacific partnership tradeagreements international trade corporate-led

shared by Arabica Robusta on 16 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • The massive text largely reflects the interests of the 500 official U.S. trade advisors representing corporate interests that had privileged access while the public, Congress and the press were shut out the secretive process: investor privileges that make it easier to offshore American jobs to low wage countries and retrograde terms that expose U.S. food safety, environmental, Internet freedom, health and other safeguards to attack and rollback.
  • Except the WTO just sideswiped Obama's TPP claims. Will he stand by his claim that 'no trade agreement is going to force us to change our laws? If so, Obama's Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, did not get the memo. "Congress has got to fix this problem. They either have to repeal or modify and amend it," Vilsack said in May when the WTO issued a previous ruling on the case.
  • After previous WTO rulings, the United States has rolled back U.S. Clean Air Act regulations on gasoline cleanliness rules successfully challenged by Venezuela and Mexico and Endangered Species Act rules relating to shrimping techniques that kill sea turtles after a successful challenge by Malaysia and other nations. The U.S. also altered auto fuel efficiency (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards that were successfully challenged by the European Union.
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  • Sadly, this ruling is not a fluke. Two weeks ago, the WTO ruled that U.S. "dolphin-safe" tuna labels, which allows consumers to choose tuna caught without dolphin-killing fishing practices, were also a "technical barrier to trade" that must be eliminated or weakened.
Arabica Robusta

It's Time To Take A Stand For Workers On TPP | PopularResistance.Org - 0 views

www.popularresistance.org/ake-a-stand-for-workers-on-tpp

corporate-led globalization trans-pacific partnership tradeagreements international trade

shared by Arabica Robusta on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Take, for instance, labor rights. While those promoting the trade deal said it would advance workers in member nations and allow the formation of unions, the actual language in the agreement offers only false promises of progress. In fact, countries with abysmal labor standards will have to do little, if anything, to comply with the commitments of the TPP’s labor chapter. A country may have to adopt a minimum wage, but even one penny an hour would be sufficient to meet the requirements of the TPP.
  • While elected officials often use hyperbole to talk about so-called critical votes they make, this is one time they won’t be. The lives of millions of Americans will beadversely affected if those on Capitol Hill ultimately vote to approve the TPP. That’s why we and our coalition partners are speaking out forcefully against this deal. And it’s why lawmakers must side with their constituents over corporate interests when they ultimately consider the trade agreement next year.
Arabica Robusta

The Disaster of Greek Austerity, Part 2 » TripleCrisis - 0 views

triplecrisis.com/ster-of-greek-austerity-part-2

neoliberalism neoclassical economic crisis structural adjustment greece

shared by Arabica Robusta on 24 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • European Union officials have categorically ruled out any possibility of a debt write-down. Restructuring in the form of a lengthening of maturity or perhaps a lowering of interest rates is still on the table, but it would have very debatable long-term results.
  • “People would take to the streets because they hoped they could make an actual difference,” she says. “Now it is clear that our hopes were false.” That said, so far the only coherent argument about how Greece could adopt an anti-bailout strategy has been presented by Popular Unity, a new political front that includes SYRIZA’s left wing that split from the party by refusing to accept the new bailout. However, Popular Unity has failed to convince Greek voters and did not gain parliamentary representation.
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