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by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for October 11 – 15 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. There are a couple of signs that the inflationary surge may be at or just past its peak, mainly in that the costs for ship transportation, which have been soaring for months, have stopped doing so and in one case have reversed. Meanwhile, on the production side, some commodity costs are still increasing sharply. As...

from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh It is by now well known that three decades of financial globalization have led to massive increases in income and asset inequalities in the United States and Europe. But in the developing world, the effects of financial globalization have been even worse: along with new inequality and instability, the creation of “emerging markets” to support investment in poor countries has undermined development projects and created a relationship in which poor...

It seems almost inconceivable that the culture wars that have dominated Australian public life for decades could end, and with victory for the progressive side on nearly every front.  And I have made premature predictions to this effect before.   But consider the following list of events over the last couple of years, many in the last few months. *  After decades of quasi-legality in many states, abortion rights have been enshrined in law throughout Australia – attempts to...

from Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan Introduction In 2012, we published a paper in the Journal of Critical Globalization Studies titled ‘Imperialism and Financialism: The Story of a Nexus’. Our topic was the chameleon-like Marxist notion of imperialism and how its different theories related to finance. Here is the article’s summary: Over the past century, the nexus of imperialism and financialism has become a major axis of Marxist theory and praxis. Many Marxists consider this...

from Terry Hathaway Contemporary political and economic discourse sees capitalist systems characterised as market economies, and references to both The Market and markets are ubiquitous; markets are seemingly everywhere. This situation is distinctly odd, as while economic relations have been more and more characterised as “markets”, many economies have seen both the withering away of traditional marketplaces and the concurrent growth of hierarchically ordered non-market economic...

from C. P. Chandrasekhar China’s Evergrande group, identified as the world’s most indebted property company with accumulated liabilities in excess of $300 billion, missed an interest payment instalment due on September 23, 2021 on bonds borrowed through US dollar bond markets. Though the company enjoys a 30-day grace period to pay up and avoid being in default, the absence as yet of any clarification on the missed instalment has increased uncertainty. Markets seem sceptical that the firm...

from Terry Hathaway – http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue97/Hathaway97.pdf Watson (2018) shows that within neoclassical economics the shifting definition of the market has led to three conceptualisations of the market that are rolled into one another; the descriptive concept, the analytical concept, and the formalist concept. The descriptive concept can be seen in Smith where the idea is of “the market literally as a marketplace, with all the hustle and bustle of people going about...

from Blair Fix – http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue97/Fix97.pdf Putting a fence around something and calling it “property” is step one of capitalization. But property alone is not enough. Romans had property. So did most feudal kingdoms. But these societies did not have capitalization. To capitalize property, there is a second step. You must mix property with finance. The word “finance” evokes a sense of awe – a sense of other-worldly complexity. But at its heart, finance is simple. It...

from Dean Baker and Arjun Jayadev  The Covid 19 pandemic is once again at an inflection point– with cases now falling sharply in most of the world. The current pandemic may be coming under control, but after millions of preventable deaths,  this is very far from a success story and it is as good  a time as any to take a hard look at our failings, especially with regard to our management of knowledge Across the world, the number of Covid infections are declining: the United States numbers...