debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
With less than six million inhabitants, the U.S. state of Wisconsin is not precisely what one would call a political powerhouse, however, after the newly elected Republican governor, Scott Walker, unleashed a full scale attack on union rights, the state seems to be competing with Mummar al Gaddafi’s Libya for nationwide attention. For days now, [...]
Julia Gillard is wrestling with a problem that would be the envy of her prime ministerial and presidential peers: how to manage the proceeds of the boom. Like its seasons, Australia’s economy and politics are at opposite points in the cycle relative to our northern hemisphere peers. The country is currently in the depths of [...]
A few weeks ago, and after twelve months of being trapped under the global negative spotlight, Greece managed to produce some impressive news on the economy front. I am not referring to the fiscal adjustment program, which has so far been ambitious and front loaded, cutting the deficit by 6% consequently proving our critics wrong. [...]
Public ignorance of the reality of how the economy actually works is a lamentably common fault these days (I count myself among the guilty), and frequently results in crude, polarising debates that are easily dismissed by decision-makers for their inaccurate insignificance and predilection for ideological posturing. While I do not like it, in fact it [...]
A little more than three years ago, just as the financial crisis was getting into full swing, I published a guide to the international system of financial regulation, Global Financial Regulation: The Essential Guide. It described an elaborate spider’s web of committees, councils, and agencies with overlapping responsibilities, unrepresentative memberships, and inadequate enforcement powers – a [...]
Neoliberal restructuring and the economic crisis have led to increasing inequality, social polarisation and societal disintegration. That austerity politics fosters these developments is widely acknowledged. Its gender effects, however, are mostly neglected, though, in contrast to the public rhetoric of equal opportunities and gender mainstreaming, gender inequality is rising. This contribution, therefore, focuses on the impact of [...]
However circumspect Mervyn King may have been about raising interest rates in the Bank of England’s (BoE) quarterly inflation report issued in February, it is clear that the City wants him to do so. Indeed, judging from the fact that 12-month interest rate futures are now 1.4%, it is generally thought that there will be [...]
It is hard to know whether ECB President Trichet is more to blame or the Reuters reporters. But what is clear is that a wrong message is sent on the key issue of wages by reports such as this one, which muddles up a number of issues. President Trichet is correct, in principle, to stress [...]
The last post criticised the FT’s Ralph Atkins for using spurious arguments to claim a need for restrictive policies to quell an upsurge in inflation that only he and some hardline central bankers can see. Whoops he did it again! Inflation, we are now told ‘threatens global lifestyle hopes‘. Yes, really. The empirical ‘basis’ for [...]
The populist-conservative zeitgeist, which tends to cast a spell over large swathes of the electorate in today’s Europe, may act as a common enemy for a progressive concentration of forces. Reports about the state of the European Left tend to be rather gloomy and depressing; no laughing material to cheer people up. But from the [...]
Bye bye Neo-liberalism, Guten Tag Ordo-Liberalismus. After his infatuation with Blair’s brand of Neo-liberalism in the first few months of his Presidency, then his flirt with Keynesianism and “dirigisme” at the height of the financial crisis and great recession, Nicolas Sarkozy seems to have succumbed to the charms of Ordo-liberalismus. It is a conclusion which [...]
Paul Krugman recently penned a 6000 word essay for New York Times Magazine provocatively titled “Can Europe Be Saved?” (January 16, 2011) Coming from anyone else than a Nobel Prize winning economist, such a title questioning the survivability of the largest economy in the world, with more Fortune 500 companies than the United States and [...]
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