debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
One of our era’s foundational myths is that globalization has condemned the nation-state to irrelevance. The revolution in transport and communications, we hear, has vaporized borders and shrunk the world. New modes of governance, ranging from transnational networks of regulators to international civil-society organizations to multilateral institutions, are transcending and supplanting national lawmakers. Domestic policymakers, [...]
In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the world discovered by Alice was one in which every aspect of reality was inverted. Big things were small. Small things grew big. The Cheshire cat faded into a grin. One side of a mushroom made you grow. The other made you shrink. It was also a world [...]
Yet again banks have to be rescued because financial markets have gone wild. And because still no effective rules and regulations have been introduced to make banks pay for the high risks they are taking. It feels like “Groundhog Day”: Everything starts all over again, nobody seems to remember anything. Has anybody learned anything? After [...]
Could the financial crisis of 2007-2008 happen again? Since the crisis erupted, there has been no shortage of opportunities – in the form of inadequate conclusions and decisions by officials – to nurture one’s anxiety about that prospect. Over the course of the three G-20 summits held since the crisis, world leaders have agreed to [...]
A while ago, along with Paul Krugman, I had some fun with Alan Greenspan’s “markets work well, with notably rare exceptions“. The NRE he had in mind was, well, the Great Recession of 2008/9, which some are seeing now as the Little Depression of 2007-(hopefully)2012. But if exceptions can occur in time – markets as [...]
Reading this article about Wal Mart stocking guns reminded me of a post just over a year ago about the US-EU divide. That focused on health-care and included some other major trans-Atlantic differences. The ability of American citizens to buy shotguns and hunting rifles in supermarkets (and the latter’s freedom to sell them) were not one [...]
On the day after the presentation of the governing Coalition’s budget in the United Kingdom (24 March), an “expert” form the Adam Smith Foundation was quoted in The Guardian asserting that if every small business were to hire only one new employee the UK would have no one without a job. He went on to [...]
Culminating in the current economic crisis, neoliberal restructuring has led to growing social disintegration and increasing exclusion from societal participation. This indicates a profound social and a latent political crisis, as reflected by, partly tremendous, electoral gains of the extreme right in many European countries. Reawakening nationalisms and increasing xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia and sexism characterise [...]
Wonder what’s happening with bank reform? Watch your wallets. Having created giant loopholes in the Dodd-Frank law recently passed by Congress (keeping “customized” derivatives underground, for example), fighting off attempts to cap the size of the biggest banks, and keeping capital requirements relatively modest, Wall Street is now busily whittling back the rest through regulations. [...]
Today is car-free Sunday in Brussels. For most bruxellois it is a chance to walk, skate or cycle around familiar streets in an unfamiliar guise, namely without the noise, smell, stress, pollution and accident risk that, on 364 days a year, are caused by private motor vehicles. Especially given decent weather, like today, it is [...]
It is two years since Lehman brothers collapsed and the global financial system teetered on the brink – ok, I am a day late: as airlines like to say, this was ‘due to operational reasons’. The balance since then is very mixed. A financial meltdown and a Great Depression have, it appears, been avoided, but [...]
A seemingly arcane piece* in the back section of today’s Financial Times reports that industrial companies are to be exempted from planned European rules requiring them to use clearing houses for over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives trades after ‘months of lobbying’ by, surprise!, industrial companies. They have argued that such a requirement would be hugely costly, ‘possibly [...]
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