gettyimages:
A black hole opens over London and sucks all the excess capitol from world financial markets, They nick name it the “Neo-Liberal-Arsehole”.
(via peace-out35)
10 months agoJuly 31, 2012 226 notes Reblog London economy
London’s status as a hub of unfettered international finance makes it uniquely adaptable, and uniquely vulnerable.
By Dan Hind
Via: Aljazeera
excerpt:
The US senate has just published a damning report on the activities of HSBC’s foreign subsidiaries. Apparently “the Mexican affiliate transported $7 billion in physical US dollars to HBUS from 2007 to 2008, outstripping other Mexican banks, even one twice its size, raising red flags that the volume of dollars included proceeds from illegal drug sales in the United States”. This follows revelations about the role of Wachovia’s London subsidiary in facilitating suspicious money transfers between Mexico and the US.
This shouldn’t surprise or shock us. Global capitalism is, after all, in key respects, a criminal endeavour. The financial sector in Britain is heavily involved in making this system work. It provides the means for organisations and individuals to escape from limits imposed by merely national law into an untaxed, unknowable ether. The City of London is the enabler of those who aspire to serious wealth and power.
And as the capital of global capitalism, the City must accept the corollary. Just as it was during the Atlantic slave trade and the opium trade with China, the City is the world capital of organised crime.
10 months agoJuly 25, 2012 1 note Reblog London Finance Economy
Via: Charles Mudede
The title of the Bloomberg piece: Wildfire Tests Police Force In Colorado Anti-Tax Movement’s Home. Its opening:
As Colorado Springs battles a rash of burglaries after a wildfire that still licks at its boundaries, it does so with fewer police and firefighters.
The city where the Waldo Canyon fire destroyed 346 homes and forced more than 34,000 residents to evacuate turned off one-third of its streetlights two years ago, halted park maintenance and cut services to close a $28 million budget gap after sales-tax revenue plummeted and voters rejected a property-tax increase.
The municipality, at 416,000 the state’s second-largest, auctioned both its police helicopters and shrank public-safety ranks through attrition by about 8 percent; it has 50 fewer police and 39 fewer firefighters than five years ago. More than 180 National Guard troops have been mobilized to secure the city after the state’s most destructive fire. At least 32 evacuated homes were burglarized and dozens of evacuees’ cars were broken into, said Police Chief Pete Carey.
“It has impacted the response,” said Karin White, a 54- year-old accountant, who returned home June 28 to a looted and vandalized house, with a treasured, century-old family heirloom smashed.
Read Entire Article
(Source: twitter.com)
11 months agoJuly 4, 2012 1 note Reblog Taxes Fire Economy Climate Change
Via Greg Palast in the Guardian:
Robert Mundell, evil genius of the euro
For the architect of the euro, taking macroeconomics away from elected politicians and forcing deregulation were part of the plan
Read Article
11 months agoJune 27, 2012 2 notes Reblog economy euro
Via: Sanders.Senate.Gov
During the financial crisis, at least 18 former and current directors from Federal Reserve Banks worked in banks and corporations that collectively received over $4 trillion in low-interest loans from the Federal Reserve.
Thnx: theamericanbear
1 year agoJune 14, 2012 1 note Reblog economy
robertreich:
Rarely in history has the cause of a major economic problem been so clear yet have so few been willing to see it.
The major reason this recovery has been so anemic is not Europe’s debt crisis. It’s not Japan’s tsumami. It’s not Wall Street’s continuing excesses. It’s not, as right-wing economists…
Read Entire Post
1 year agoJune 13, 2012 167 notes Reblog economy robert reich
Via: Guardian.UK
By Kim Willsher, Paris
Monday 21 May 2012
The rising star of Europe Alexis Tsipras, the radical left Greek leader, has arrived in Paris to warn EU countries that their turn would come if they failed to oppose the radical austerity that is driving Greece to the brink of “collective suicide”.
Tsipras, who is leading an austerity-backlash, said the future of Europe and the euro depended on the outcome of the Greece debt crisis. And he said he could feel a “wind of change” blowing across the continent that he hoped would lead to the “complete re-founding of Europe based on social cohesion and solidarity”.
To continue down the path of austerity, he warned, would turn the Greek tragedy into an European catastrophe.
“Greece is a link in a chain. If it breaks it is not just the link that is broken but the whole chain. What people have to understand is that the Greek crisis concerns not just Greece but all European people so a common European solution has to be found,” he told a press conference in Paris
read entire article
1 year agoMay 21, 2012 1 note Reblog Tsipras greece economy radical austerity
Via: Guardian UK
By Helena Smith in Athens, Friday 18 May 201
>
Greece’s eurozone fate may now be in the hands of the 37-year-old political firebrand and his Syriza party
I don’t believe in heroes or saviours,” says Alexis Tsipras, “but I do believe in fighting for rights … no one has the right to reduce a proud people to such a state of wretchedness and indignity.”
The man who holds the fate of the euro in his hands – as the leader of the Greek party willing to tear up the country’s €130bn (£100bn) bailout agreement – says Greece is on the frontline of a war that is engulfing Europe.
A long bombardment of “neo-liberal shock” – draconian tax rises and remorseless spending cuts – has left immense collateral damage. “We have never been in such a bad place,” he says, sleeves rolled up, staring hard into the middle distance, from behind the desk that he shares in his small parliamentary office. “After two and a half years of catastrophe, Greeks are on their knees. The social state has collapsed, one in two youngsters is out of work, there are people leaving en masse, the climate psychologically is one of pessimism, depression, mass suicides.”
more
(Source: twitter.com)
1 year agoMay 19, 2012 24 notes Reblog Greece Economy Terror
socialuprooting:
A Senate Independent is calling for the head of JPMorgan Chase to step down as a board member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Monday that the $2 billion trading loss by JPMorgan underscores the need for the Federal Reserve to make changes that eliminate conflicts of interest.
“It is an obvious conflict of interest for Jamie Dimon, the CEO of the largest bank in America, to serve on the New York Fed’s board of directors,” Sanders said.
Sanders said he is working on legislation that would end the conflict of interest.
“No one who works for a firm receiving direct financial assistance from the Fed should be allowed to sit on the Fed’s board of directors or be employed by the Fed,” Sanders said.
“The New York Fed is in charge of both regulating JPMorgan Chase and deciding whether or not to provide billions of dollars in virtually zero-interest loans to this too-big-to-fail institution if it needs another bailout,” he said.
“This is a clear example of the fox guarding the hen house.”
(via pieceinthepuzzlehumanity-deacti)
1 year agoMay 14, 2012 18 notes Reblog economy politics
Via: debtonation.org
The political consequences – and threats
This profound global economic failure, is prolonged unnecessarily by adherence to the dogma of orthodox neoclassical economics, and has, naturally, a social and political impact.
From the Joppik Party in Hungary, to the Progress Party in Norway far-right parties have quadrupled their average share of the vote over the last few years. In Holland Geert Wilders’ far right party is the third largest. In countries like Hungary the Far Right now command the same levels of support (around 16-17%) as the National Socialists did in Germany in 1930 (18.3%). In France, Marie Le Pen’s holocaust-denying party commanded the support of one in five French voters in the first round of the 2012 Presidential elections.
Conditions for a fascist backlash have not been better since the 1930s.
1 year agoApril 28, 2012 Reblog economy
Via: debtonation.org
blind spot for credit
There is only one tool these policymakers argue, with which to tackle the impending catastrophic crisis facing Europe: monetary activism by the Bank of England or the European Central Bank. That is shorthand for pumping money into private banks and leaving them to tidy up the mess.
But as Keynes taught us, we cannot, in a slump, separate monetary policy and fiscal policy. Pumping ‘liquidity’ into the stratosphere that is the globalised and largely unregulated banking system – without terms and conditions – means that the credit so created is invariably used by bankers for speculative purposes. It is particularly so now, because bank balance sheets are shot full of holes, and bankers and financiers urgently need to mobilise additional cash to clean up those balance sheets. And, after all is said and done, the returns on speculation tend to be higher than returns on sound investment in the real economy.
In a slump following the catastrophic bursting of a credit bubble which has left the private sector heavily indebted and risk-averse, the wiser action for the central bank would be to direct credit creation towards the last investor left standing: government.
But ideological antipathy to public sector investment prevents orthodox economists from recommending the only course of action that would revive employment and economic activity in the debt-laden Eurozone and the Anglo-American economies
This is part of the end of Pettifors presentation, I recommend her presentation to everyone who has as much trouble as me, understanding the absurd behavior of current Governments and their continued kowtowing to Big Finance. We will all suffer from their hubris.
1 year agoApril 28, 2012 1 note Reblog economy
THE EU & GREECE: A CAPITALISM THAT HAS PERSUADED THE WORLD THAT CAPITALISM IS THE WORLD
Via: The Guardian
Excerpt:
In essence, this crisis is a failure of the EU states to show solidarity in the face of an onslaught from the financial markets. At first glance this seems to be a very simple fight. In one corner you have nation states, which have the well-being of their citizens as their raison d’être; in the other you have global capitalism as represented by the financial markets, which has the wealth of a tiny few as its raison d’être. But the nation state has, for a considerable time, identified itself with those same markets. States have agreed to see themselves as economies rather than societies. More recently we have been led to believe that the market alone can provide everything the citizen needs and much more efficiently than the structures that the citizens normally rely on and which they have, over generations, erected as protections against the revenge of the market.
This is the triumph of capitalism, that it has persuaded the world that capitalism is the world.
(Source: criticallegalthinking.com)
1 year agoFebruary 21, 2012 Reblog Greece Economy EU Capitalism
Video: The End Of Capitalism?
Penn Humanities Forum
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Three years after the near collapse of global financial markets, America is still struggling with unemployment, debt, and foreclosure, European governments are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy—and the world’s billionaires are getting richer faster than ever before. The current situation is not sustainable. But what changes need to be made to overcome this mounting crisis of our world economic system? How radical an adaptation will be required? David Harvey, the brilliant theorist and scathing critic of postmodern society, looks at what the future holds for global capitalism.
This video will require a commitment, it is over an hour, however you will be rewarded with plain talk about our economic/political situation. Professor Harvey understands how we got into our current mess and has much to offer to those looking for paths to change.
1 year agoDecember 11, 2011 3 notes Reblog economy politics class confict
