Members of the GUE/NGL protest the existence of tax havens in the European Parliament in 2014. Photo by GUE/NGL (Flickr). Successive Canadian governments have treated taxes like a problem that can only be fixed through tax cuts, with more slashes promised from all sides during every election. The result is
Continue readingTag: economic crisis
Canadian Dimension: World’s 500 Richest People Gained $1.2 Trillion in Wealth in 2019
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett at the 2018 Berkshire Hathaway shareholders weekend. Photo from Flickr. The 500 richest people in the world, all of whom are billionaires, gained a combined $1.2 trillion in wealth in 2019, further exacerbating inequities that have not been seen since the late 1920s. That’s according
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Why the ‘Ok Boomer’ phenomenon is short-sighted
Starting as an internet meme, the ‘OK boomer’ trend has exploded, from TikTok videos to merchandise including hoodies, iPhone cases and shower curtains. Image taken from Amazon.com. The “Ok Boomer” meme, which many young people are using online as a rebuttal against out-of-touch baby boomers, taps into frustrations disproportionately experienced
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: The future of the global economy hinges on four games of chicken
Container ships at the Port of Oakland. Photo by mental.masala (Flickr). In the classic game of chicken, two drivers race directly toward each other, and the first to swerve is the loser. If neither swerves, both will probably die. In the past, such scenarios have been studied to assess the
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Austerity Without End
Photo by Manos Simonides (Flickr) In 2019, the now 187-member International Labour Organization celebrated its 100th anniversary. As one of the oldest agencies of the United Nations, the ILO used the occasion to renew calls for improved opportunities and working conditions, social protections and collective bargaining rights. The ILO’s Global
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Argentina and the next Global Financial Crisis
President Mauricio Macri and Managing Director of the IMF Christine Lagarde, at the 2018 G7 Summit in Canada • Photo by Casa Rosada (Argentina Presidency of the Nation) On August 12, 2019, financial markets in Argentina crashed. The stock market contracted 38% in just one day. The currency, the Peso,
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Bernie’s Right: Three Billionaires Really Do Have More Wealth Than Half of America
Illustration from Daily Clout The wealthiest 3 billionaires in the U.S. – Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett — now have as much wealth as the bottom half of the U.S. population combined. Those were the first words spoken at last night’s 2020 Democratic Debate, citing a wealth inequality
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: A Tale of Two Austerities
Photo by William Murphy The greatly intensified austerity that has been imposed in the UK since 2010 has been looked to with considerable approval by right wing imitators. Among countries that had developed a relatively adequate ‘welfare state’, the attack on social provision in the UK has been outstandingly severe.
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Exploitation and Expropriation, or Why Capitalism Must be Attacked with Equal Force on Every Front
Photo by Steffi Reichert [Author’s note: This essay is based upon arguments made in Chapter 2 (“Some Theoretical Considerations”) of my book, Can the Working Class Change the World? Unless otherwise noted, the quotes are from this chapter and are either my words or those of someone I am quoting]
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: The Deep Roots of the Meth Crisis in Winnipeg
Photo from iStock I think a case can be made that in large part, the meth problem is a reflection of a much deeper societal malaise. We are still in the midst of what is now a 40 year revolution, driven in large part by dramatic technological change and accompanied
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Ten considerations for the next Alberta budget
Over at the Behind The Numbers website, I’ve written a blog post titled “Ten considerations for the next Alberta budget.” The blog post is a summary of a recent workshop organized by the Alberta Alternative Budget Working Group. The link to the blog post is here.
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
Book Review Adam Tooze. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. Viking. New York. 2018 The global economic crisis is now more than a decade old, and is far from definitively behind us. Indeed, many fear, with good reason, that the recent, uneven and lethargic global recovery
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Conjuring Up the Next Depression
Photo from Public Domain During the financial crisis of 2008, the world’s central banks, including the Federal Reserve, injected trillions of dollars of fabricated money into the global financial system. This fabricated money has created a worldwide debt of $325 trillion, more than three times global GDP. The fabricated money
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Teaching macroeconomics as though Lehmans didn’t happen
September 15th marked the tenth anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers, destabilizing Western economies at levels not seen since the 1930s. It also marked the second week of fall classes, with many economics graduate students cranking through equations that define the discipline’s conventional macroeconomic models. With such names as
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: If You Read Between The Lines, Global Economic Leaders Are Telling Us Exactly What Is Coming
Sometimes, a strongly-worded denial is the most damning evidence of all that something is seriously wrong. And when things start to really get crazy, “the spin” is often the exact opposite of the truth. In recent days we have seen a lot of troubling headlines and a lot of chaos
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Capitalism, Changed By Its Contradictions
This week on Economic Update, Prof. Wolff delivers updates on the growing poverty rate in California, the epidemic of childhood obesity in the U.S. and the economic fallout of Trump’s steel tariff. The second half of the show features Professor Wolff’s explanation of how politics in the United States has
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Europe’s biggest bank retreats from the oilsands
Photo by Barry Caruth Europe’s largest bank has joined the list of global investors retreating from new financial commitments in the fossil fuel industry, including investments in oil-rich Alberta. HSBC, whose global assets total more than $2 trillion, announced Friday that as the climate change crisis deepens, it will no
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Why Was Greece So Brutalized By Their ‘Bailout’?
The tortures that the Grecian people are being subjected to by the neo-liberal institutions of Europe (European Commission, European Central Bank and IMF) are unnecessarily brutal and threaten to unravel the fabric of their society. We can learn what is in store for other nations that dare to act against
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: The Stock Market Jitters
The real problem is the absence of a sustainable growth model. My latest Globe ROB column.
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Nearly Half of Canadians are Left with $200 or Less After Paying their Monthly Bills and Debt
Photo by LaTunya Howard Nearly half (44%) of Canadians are $200 or less away from financial insolvency each month after paying their bills and debt obligations, a new Ipsos survey for MNP Debt has found. This is down 8 points from March (52%) 2017, and down 12 points from September
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