Real-World Economics Review

According to Eurostat, unemployment differences in the EU are still large (graph). Especially the euro countries do bad. The Netherlands and Germany seem to buck this trend but this must be ascribed to whopping surpluses on their current accounts. As not all countries can, by definition, run current account surpluses at the same time (my surplus is your deficit) this means that total domestic demand in the Euro Area is way to low. Another option: people are working too much and have to...

from David Ruccio Gabriel Zucman, in his article in the special issue of Pathways, “State of the Union: The Poverty and Inequality Report 2016” (pdf), reveals lots of scary numbers about wealth inequality in the United States.* The scariest is the percentage of wealth owned by the top 0.1 percent of households, which “has exploded in the U.S. over the past four decades.” The share of wealth held by the top 0.1 percent of households is now almost as high as in the...

To simple people it is indubitable that the nearest cause of the enslavement of one class of men by another is money. They know that it is possible to cause more trouble with a rouble than with a club; it is only political economy that does not want to know it. — Leo Tolstoy, What Shall We Do Then? (1886) The financial sector has the same objective as military conquest: to gain control of land and basic infrastructure, and collect tribute. To update von Clausewitz, finance has become war...

from David Ruccio Eduardo Porter is right: the “long, painful slog out of the Great Recession” hasn’t been accompanied by any kind of shared prosperity. As the chart above reveals, the share of income going to the bottom 90 percent of U.S. households has actually fallen since 2007 (from 50.3 percent to 49.5 percent)—and, in recent years, remains far below what it was (67.4 percent) in 1970. In other words, the so-called recovery looks a lot like the unequalizing dynamic of...

During the first Putin presidency, the Russian government gave a very high priority to paying back Russian international debt and used quite a lot of  the income from oil to do this. Jeffrey Sachs answers why (also read the last paragraph): The lack of Western assistance The lack of Western assistance was grim and was my greatest frustration[32] during late 1991 and 1992.  The early days were inauspicious to say the least.  When the G-7 deputies came to Moscow in late November 1991, just...

For a kind of prediction of the 1947 mortality crisis you will find a march 1947 article by Ernest Germain published by the fourth international here (I love the internet). Basically, the exhaustion of war time stocks (during the war partly provided by the 1943 United Nations Relief and Rehabiliation Administration), the horrible losses of people manpower suffered during the war, the dislocation and loss of production capacity caused by the war and a terrible drought in 1946 caused a...

The population of Russia is growing again – because Russia accepts millions of Ukrainian refugees. Russia is supposed to be a world-class bully again – but if so (and it is indeed making things in Syria even more vicious than ‘we’ already did…) it is clearly playing outside its league. It is a country with a dwindling population and a dwindling GDP. But while preparing the graph above, I wondered why, after the post 1990 demographic catastrophe (look here  for a The Lancet article about...

The Big Picture Interview w/Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research (C.E.P.R.)/Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. President Obama is gearing up for a big lame-duck session fight for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Supporters and opponents of this deal call it "free trade" - are they both wrong? For more information on the stories we've covered visit our websites at thomhartmann.com - freespeech.org - and RT.com....

Since 1975 workers have received almost none of the gains of increased productivity, which has increased by 143% since around 1975 (figure 14). In other words, productivity has more than doubled, while workers received none of the gains. This can be explained by the deindustrialization of the US economy, as heavy industries followed by manufacturing in general were exported to Asia. Due to this trend there was a huge decrease in unionization which went from 39% in 1940 to around 10% in...