While forecasters grapple with predictions on the likely contraction in the world’s leading economies, big finance, especially in the US, seems to be prematurely preparing for its next celebration. Recall that while the post-2008 Great Recession was precipitated by the…
There is a massive problem of external debt building up for the third world, of which the recent Argentine debt crisis was only one manifestation. At the root of the problem is the collapse of primary commodity prices in the…
While everyone was busy looking at the Covid-19 numbers across the world, other “stuff was happening” in international trade: the US-China trade war, which started as far back July 2018, just got significantly worse. This on-again-off-again war has been a…
The demands for a "Global Green New Deal" were never about some Utopian vision or naïve perception of global togetherness: combined and co-ordinated global efforts are necessary to ensure the survival of the planet and of human life on it.…
Early evidence of the crisis in the developed world induced by the Covid-19 pandemic is trickling in. One set of numbers provide the first estimates of GDP growth in the first quarter of 2020, which includes the period when lockdowns…
The current globalization was always legitimized by the argument that capital today, unlike in colonial times, had become blind to racial and other such distinctions across countries in deciding upon its location; it would now flow wherever opportunities for profitable…
There is an exodus of finance from the third world at present, far exceeding in scale what had occurred in 2008 after the financial crisis. Even more important than the actual outflow is the desire on the part of finance…
At the recent G20 and IMF-WB Spring meetings held virtually in the third week of April 2020, a proposal for the IMF to issue an additional 500 billion of SDRs was blocked by the United States and – astonishingly –…
The cooperation between the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and some non-OPEC oil exporters, including oil-major Russia, to limit production and supply of oil and help hold oil prices has collapsed. In a dramatic post-Coronavirus-pandemic turn, discussions to extend…
Even while the slow growth that followed the Great Recession endures, the world economy is staring at another recession. The OECD Secretariat has reduced its forecast of global GDP growth by half a percentage point to 2.4 per cent, which…
