Tag Archives: Europe

Mikhail Gorbachev died on August 30, 2022. Since then, praises have flowed from Western leaders. Those praises obscure how the West betrayed Gorbachev after he fell from power, and how that betrayal seeded the Ukraine conflict. The story is complicated because Gorbachev’s fall was triggered by Communist Party hardliners, so the troubles which befell Russia […]

Sergio Cesaratto – The economic and social consequences of the war on Europe and Italy Brave New Europe, May 12, 2022 Political realism offers useful keys to interpreting the international political economy, which has never been more endangered than today by the military escalation in Ukraine. The EU and Italy risk to be the pots and pans in the unprecedented economic crisis looming ahead. Sergio Cesaratto teaches European monetary and fiscal...

My latest book has recently been published by Edward Elgar. The book explores the impact of neoliberal policies on the US, Europe, and the global economy. It shows how the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession were predictable outcomes of the neoliberal policy experiment, as is the emergence of global “race to the bottom” competition. […]

The inevitable has happened. Russia has invaded Ukraine. It was inevitable because the US and its NATO partners had backed Russia into a corner from which it could only escape by military means. In effect, Russia confronted a future in which the US would increasingly tighten the noose around its neck by further eastward expansion […]

Few doubt that the mid-fourteenth-century Afro-Eurasian plague pandemic, the Black Death, killed tens of millions of people. In western Asia and Europe, where its spread and mortality are best understood, upwards of 50% of the population is thought to have died within approximately 5 years. …The regionality of the plague’s mortality is particularly underexplored, owing to the availability of written sources and the limits of traditional historical methods. Here we pioneer a new approach, big...

American exceptionalism is the most dangerous doctrine in the world, and it has been on full display in the current Ukraine crisis. Worse yet, the loudest advocates have been America’s elite liberal class. The doctrine of exceptionalism holds that the US is inherently different from and superior to other nations. That superiority means the US […]

Preamble. Living in the US and writing honestly about US-Russia relations (and China too) is very difficult. That is because the US is the aggressor, but Russia is an authoritarian country. That split is used by the US establishment to shuffle discussion away from US aggression on to Russian authoritarianism. Side-by-side, anyone calling the US […]

An ECB’s Staff Narrative of Two Decades of European Central Banking: a critical review Working Paper n.866 Dicembre 2021Sergio Cesaratto DEPS, USiena Abstract Monetary Policy in Times of Crisis (Rostagno et al. 2021) has three relevant features. The first is its criticism of the absence of an adequate European fiscal policy during the financial crisis. This left the ECB on its own. The second feature concerns the...

Sergio Cesaratto – Those Italian subsidies for Germany December 8, 2021 Economics, EU politics, EU-Institutions, Finance, Inequality, National Politics, Regulation Italy has paid for certain ill-advised policies of the ECB – influenced by Berlin, the dominant power in Europe – with dozens of points of additional debt/GDP and finding itself ever poorer, while Germany symmetrically gained. Sergio Cesaratto teaches European monetary and fiscal...

Every week my e-mail box receives a steady stream of articles aimed at cultivating public animus to Russia. The articles are always wrapped in a narrative in which Russia is a threat to democracy in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. The effect is to create public support for hardline action (economic and/or military) against Russia. […]