All the articles
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Ecuador: Brutal economic decisions (“paquetazo”)
11 October 2019 - by Diego Borja Cornejo
With a stubborn position that borders on political suicide, the government of Lenin Moreno, during the seventh day of massive and combative Popular Unemployment, has preferred to repress thousands of indigenous, students, settlers and workers who have risen throughout the country, by employing savage police and military force against them. In (...) -
Swiss Franc Mortgages: Illegitimate and Illegal
8 October 2019 - by Eric Toussaint
In Poland and France, along with Croatia, Hungary, Slovenia, Greece and other Balkan countries, the scandal of household mortgages made out in Swiss francs has hit over a million victims of big grasping private banks. The Court of Justice of the European Union has just given a judgement that takes the debt refusal collectivities over another (...) -
Series: Adverse International and Local Conditions for Sub-Saharan Africa (Part 1)
South African Special Economic Zones : History of Limited Successes
8 October 2019 - by Eric Toussaint, Patrick Bond, Ishmael Lesufi, Lisa Thompson
Given both short- and longer-term trends in the world and South African economies, there is a danger of government and society placing inordinate hopes in what are variously termed Export Processing Zones, Industrial Development Zones and Special Economic Zones (SEZs), as sources of economic vitality and job creation. Specific South African (...) -
Climate change and imperialism: what connects the Amazon fires and the EU-Mercosur agreement?
2 October 2019 - by Aleksandar Matković
From the crisis to the Mercosur agreement There have been many discussions on the next global crisis (including Adam Tooze and Ann Pettifor, and the Marxist economists Michael Roberts and John Smith), and I’ve also written and talked about it at least thrice (first in November, then in December 2018, and the third time on my blogpost here). (...) -
A global manufacturing recession
2 October 2019 - by Michael Roberts
As we enter October, the global recession is with us – in manufacturing. The PMI (Purchasing Managers’ Index) manufacturing activity indexes for most of the major economies are below 50, the threshold for expansion or contraction. These are only surveys of corporate managers asking them about production, sales, employment etc. But PMIs have (...) -
Yanis Varoufakis’s Account of the Greek Crisis: a Self-Incrimination
Tsipras and Varoufakis advance towards final capitulation
1 October 2019 - by Eric Toussaint
Adults in the Room, Costa-Gavras’s new film based on the book of the same title by former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, will be released from 6 November in France and Belgium (see trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3aAyJKOSO0). We publish further episodes in the Éric Toussaint’s series that relates and analyzes events that led to the (...) -
Trapped in a debt cycle
27 September 2019 - by Gihan D Chickera
The entrapment of rural communities, especially rural women, in a vicious debt cycle generated by thousands of unregulated microfinance organizations has reached epidemic proportions, affecting almost three million people island-wide. Once seen as an instrument of rural upliftment, microfinance loans have now gained notoriety for encouraging (...) -
The Credit Crunch is Back and the Federal Reserve Panics on an Ocean of Debt
25 September 2019 - by Eric Toussaint
In a state of panic and under pressure from big capital and President Trump, on Tuesday 17 September 2019, the Fed (the US Federal Reserve) pumped $53.2 billion into the banks because they were short of day-to-day funding available from the Interbank Lending Market or the Money Market Funds (see box below). Similar operations were repeated on (...) -
The Debt System, A History of Sovereign Debts and their Repudiation
For as long as there have been rich nations and poor nations, debt has been a powerful force for maintaining the unequal relations between them. Treated as sacrosanct, immutable, and eternally binding, it has become the yoke of choice for imperial powers in the post-colonial world to enforce their subservience over the global south. In this (...) -
Weapons of Legal Destruction: ISDS lawsuits and Lydian International’s Assault on Armenian Sovereignty
23 September 2019 - by Armen Abagyan
Over 3,300 investment agreements have been drawn up since the 1960’s. This byzantine nexus of Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) safeguard the global Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) apparatus encompassing a 20 trillion dollar flow of capital, and more importantly, provide the institutional framework that promotes the economic interests of (...) -
Series: 1944-2019, 75 years of interference from the World Bank and the IMF (Part 21)
The World Bank’s accounts
23 September 2019 - by Eric Toussaint
In 2019, the World Bank (WB) and the IMF will be 75 years old. These two international financial institutions (IFI), founded in 1944, are dominated by the USA and a few allied major powers who work to generalize policies that run counter the interests of the world’s populations. The WB and the IMF have systematically made loans to States as a (...) -
The Banking Sector and the Global Crisis
18 September 2019 - by Eric Toussaint
The banking system in India is faced with the worst crisis in the last few decades of its existence. The Non-Performing Assets of the Indian banks – both private and public – points towards a full-blown financial crisis that has a significant impact on the economy and exhibits no signs of an early resolution. The aggregation of bad loans gets (...) -
ECB: You can take a horse to water but….
18 September 2019 - by Michael Roberts
Last Thursday, Mario Draghi, the current head of the European Central bank, soon to be replaced by Christine Lagarde from the IMF, announced a parting gift to banks and financial markets. The ECB decided to reintroduce its bond purchasing programme in order to inject yet more billions into Europe’s banks in order to persuade them to lend onto (...) -
Microfinance has been a nightmare for the global south. Sri Lanka shows that there is an alternative
12 September 2019 - by Ahilan Kadirgamar, Niyanthini Kadirgamar
The global hegemony of finance capital is based on burgeoning household debt accompanied by devastating dispossession. This is more evident in peripheral societies, where state investment in the rural economy is abandoned for the myth of expanding incomes through self-employment with the help of microfinance. In Sri Lanka, as in many other (...) -
Financial institutions complicit in impact of austerity measures on human rights, says UN expert
10 September 2019 - by Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky
GENEVA (10 September 2019) – Austerity measures imposed by international financial institutions such as the IMF, regularly cause violations of human rights, says UN Independent Expert on foreign debt and human rights, Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky in a report to be presented to the UN General Assembly in October. “Even though austerity can be a (...) -
Feminists on the front lines of the Algerian uprising
10 September 2019 - by Leïla Ouitis
Since the start of the uprising, women have taken up an increasingly prominent role, demanding gender equality and the abolition of the patriarchal Family Code. When in early February Algeria’s ailing octogenarian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced his intention to run for the presidency for a fifth term, millions of Algerians took to (...) -
Tunisia’s Truth Commission vs France, the IMF and World Bank
8 September 2019 - by Olfa Belhassine
On July 16, Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission (IVD) sent two memorandums calling first on France and then on the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to apologize and pay reparations to Tunisian victims. It says they all have a “share of responsibility” in colonial violence and social violence linked to structural adjustment policies. (...) -
South Africa: Cancel Eskom’s odious debt to the World Bank
3 September 2019 - by Jonathan Cannard
Despite significant and wide-ranging concern about the fate of Eskom, the World Bank has recently expressed its full confidence in the state-owned power utility’s ability to complete Medupi power station and ensure national electricity provision. The bank’s vote of confidence in the struggling entity is a product of the Ramaphosa government’s (...) -
Southern Africa losing US$30 billion annually in trade-related illicit outflows, external government debt payments
2 September 2019 - by Sunit Bagree, ACTSA
According to a new report, The Money Drain: How Trade Misinvoicing and Unjust Debt Undermine Economic and Social Rights in Southern Africa, launched today by ACTSA on the eve of the SADC Summit in Dar es Salaam, rich countries may be accused of neo-colonialism if they fail to assist SADC countries to address these financial outflows. ACTION (...) -
Kenya: Perpetual Debt in the Silicon Savannah
2 September 2019 - by Emma Park, Kevin P. Donovan
Kenya’s poor were among the first to benefit from digital lending apps; now they call it slavery. Across conversations in Kenya’s pubs and WhatsApp groups, debt is on everyone’s mind. The speed and ease of access to credit through new mobile apps delivers cash to millions of Kenyans in need, but many struggle to repay. Despite their small size, (...)
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