At the last Spring meeting of the IMF and the World Bank, Christine Lagarde, the Managing Director of the IMF, had confidently stated that the world economy was on the path of recovery, a view echoed by most official soothsayers…
They march in tens of thousands, every Wednesday, through the streets of central Bogota: young and old; students and teachers; well-paid professionals, trade unionists and informal workers; healthy and disabled; urban and rural residents; family members and friends of the…
All across the world, from the United States to Britain to Europe to China, a huge resistance is building up against globalization. True, this resistance is not self-consciously aimed against globalization per se; in different countries it focuses on different…
Globalization was advertised as being beneficial for all, as constituting a bold step towards universal economic betterment. This was clearly wrong; and it was not just Left economists, but even “mainstream” economists like Paul Samuelson who had said so at…
Britain has voted to leave the European Union (EU). And the managers of global capitalism have their hands full addressing the fall-out of ‘Brexit’, even as their efforts to manage the after-shocks of the crisis of 2008 remain unsuccessful. It…
The term “involution” – which means to turn into oneself, or to shrink, or to reverse a process of evolving – may seem like a strange one to apply to societies. Yet that is the term that increasingly comes to…
Meeting in mid-April on the side lines of the spring sessions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund at Washington D.C., Finance Ministers of the G20 countries seemed overcome by a combined sense of despair and fear about…
In the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed, two countries that were seen as crucial to propping up global economic growth and even ensuring a recovery were China and India. Prior to the…
On February 4, after meetings held at Dubai for security reasons, an IMF team arrived at an agreement with officials from Islamabad, which would permit the release of the last-but-one tranche of $497 million out of an SDR 4.393 billion…
In a curious shift in perception, low and falling crude oil prices are increasingly being viewed as a disadvantage rather than a benefit to the global economy. The spot price of Brent crude has fallen from just above $100 a…
