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The Myth of ‘The Invisible Hand of the Market”

“Only once, in 18th and 19th century Britain, did the transformation of energy to coal, transport to railroads and industry to steam power take place via the market co-ordination of investment, without a push from above.” Financial Times, opinion section, ‘For sustainable finance to work, we will need central planning’ , 11 July 2021

‘Bidenomics’: Its Origins and Its Limitations

Is this shift sufficient to tackle the century’s social and ecological crises? Not nearly. Does it alter essential class relations? On the contrary: it strives to re-legitimize the social order. Is it unambiguous? No: while private finance has been kept out of new domestic infrastructure projects, the US is still driving privatization and deregulation in the global south and intensifying its new Cold War on China. Will it propel a new phase of economic expansion? I doubt it, due to the sheer scale of global overaccumulation and the fade-out of the industrialization bonanza. 1979 in Reverse

Finance

“A crash in the dollar is likely and it could fall by as much as 35 per cent by the end of 2021.“ “The end of the dollar’s exorbitant privilege”

Finance

Just more of some of the usual crimes Via Michael Roberts “The finance sector is really just a criminal conspiracy to steal from the public. So much for regulation rather than public ownership and control. Take the Wirecard scanda l. Wirecard, which started out processing payments for adult entertainment and gambling websites, filed for insolvency on June 25 after the discovery of a 1.9 billion euro hole in its accounts. German prosecutors have since opened investigations into suspected money laundering, fraud and market manipulatio n at the company. Markus Braun, the company’s former chief executive, was arrested. The company's accountants failed to carry out basic obvious auditing of the accounts and the German government ignored whistleblowers about the company and instead tried to prosecute them! Then there is the Apple tax dodge . With the connivance of the Irish government, Apple booked huge amounts of its global profits in Ireland where tax rates were deliberatel

Adam Tooze, a Lefty Liberal

"Liberalism has always contained different shades, and its dominant version has varied across countries and periods. In the capitalist world, going back to the eighties, the line of division separating a liberal politics from a politics of the left is their respective attitudes to the existing order of things: does it require structural change or situational adjustment? Between states, the ‘liberal international order’ has for thirty years been the touchstone of geopolitical reason: free markets, free trade, free movement of capital and other human rights, policed by the most powerful nation on earth with help from its allies, in accordance with its rules and its sanctions, its rewards and its retributions. Within states, ‘neoliberalism’: privatization of goods and services, deregulation of industries and of finance, fiscal retrenchment, de-unionization, weakening of labour, strengthening of capital—compensated by recognition of gender and multicultural claims. The first has
Why the Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain [and the US] 
A summary 
Anglo-American interest in the enormous hydrocarbon reserves of the Persian Gulf does not derive from a need to fuel Western consumption. 
The US has never imported more than a token amount from the Gulf and for much of  the postwar period has been a net oil exporter. Anglo-American  involvement in  the Middle East has always been principally about the strategic advantage gained from controlling Persian Gulf hydrocarbons, not Western oil needs. 
What remains a US strategy: the US and Britain would provide Saudi Arabia and  other key Gulf monarchies with  ‘sufficient military supplies to preserve internal security’. 
In a piece for the Atlantic a few months  after  9/11, Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne explained that  Washington 'assumes responsibility for stabilising the region’ because  China, Japan and  Europe  will  be dependent on its resources for the foreseeable future: ‘America  wants to discou
Algeria Many Algerians taking part in the on-going social-political movement are crazy and uneducated. They speak about "a colonialism that has been oppressing them for decades." They don't know that in prestigious universities in the West students are taught about "Post-colonialism" and "Development". Algerians should learn from "the highly educated" Westerners and stop blaming the Other for their ills. The Other has been trying to help them in all sorts of manners: "aid, loans, NGOs, weapons, support of regime to guarantee stability, bying their resources at fair price, spreading liberal values," etc. Algerians should learn from the "experts" and listen to the heads of international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. الدول العربية  بحاجة الى ثورات حقيقية لا لتغيير ما يسمى رئيس الدولة، بل لاجتثاث الدولة العميقة  واستخبارات وعسكر وحيتان المال والنفوذ الخارجي، بحاجة إلى ثورات  لإنجاز الاستقلال الحقيقي عن ا
From the archive We tried to help the "Libyans" get rid of a mad man and organise  the first 'free' elections. But, they didn't understand what 'democracy' mean. So, they started killing each other in a civil war. The disaster in Libya and Who said Gaddafi had to go? Book Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya
Admission of lack of integration is the best part I like in this review. "I loved the  New Enclosure  as an account of the operation of government under the imperative of neoliberalism. But what I craved was a deeper integration with economic history. "I think Brett does a great job of making clear that his entire argument is operating within self-imposed limits. It is an analysis of the realm of government and governmental discourse. As such it makes a huge contribution. It provides a frame within which many other histories can be written. But reading Brett has left me worrying about the sanitizing effect of this kind of methodological choice. It has left me worrying because, as I am all too aware, the same criticism can be made of my book  Crashed ." Christophers'  The New Enclosure
"With the fall of the U.S.S.R. and the rise of the U.S. to unparalleled power, Amin wrote of the ‘empire of chaos’, of a new era that would result in great inequality, precarious labour, the destruction of agriculture and the dangers of political religion. What Amin tracked in 1992 would become clear two decades later, when he revisited these same themes in  The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism  (2013). Monopoly firms had sucked the life out of the system, turning businesspeople into ‘waged servants’ and journalists into the ‘media clergy’. An unsustainable world system, with finance in dominance and people whipping from one precarious job to another, seemed to threaten the future of humanity. He surveyed the world and found no real alternative to the monopoly-dominated system that—like a vampire—sucked the blood out of the world. This did not mean that history was to drive humanity over the precipice. Other choices lay before us." Death of a Marxist
Mazzucato draws inspiration for her activism from two sources: on the one hand the heterodox economics of Karl Polanyi and on the other hand the democratic ambition of John F Kennedy. JFK inspires Mazzucato to call for the economy to be given a “new mission”. Polanyi’s analysis of the economy as a constructed social artefact makes this seem possible. If the market was made by the state then it can presumably be remade. The question, of course, is how. Unfortunately, the boldness of Mazzucato’s vision and the brashness of her rhetoric are not matched by the depth or coherence of her answer to this basic question. "Mariana Mazzucato's bold mission to reform the global economy"
Empiricism, because it takes its evidence from the existing order of things, is inherently prone to accepting as realities things that are merely evidence of underlying biases and ideological pressures. Empiricism, for Marx, will always confirm the status quo. He would have particularly disliked the modern tendency to argue from ‘facts’, as if those facts were neutral chunks of reality, free of the watermarks of history and interpretation and ideological bias and of the circumstances of their own production . The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat. No democracy has ever been destabilised by terrorism Marx and 'capitalism' by John Lanchester