The US Debt Ceiling Debate
Under pressure from globalised finance capital, most countries of the world have enacted legislation fixing the size of the fiscal deficit as a proportion of GDP; generally it is 3 per cent, and in India it is 3 per cent…
IMF – Doubling the Dose of Austerity
In a barely noticed development, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has “reformed” and extended the conditions it imposes in return for emergency balance of payments support to less developed countries with stressed external accounts. The evidence of that shift comes…
Public Opinion and Imperialism
A New York Times News Service report reproduced in The Telegraph of Kolkata (May 7), discusses the findings of a global public opinion survey carried out by the Bennett Institute of Public Policy of Cambridge University. These show that the…
The Grim Unemployment Scenario
The data on unemployment brough out by the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE) present a grim picture. Not only has the unemployment rate increased sharply for some years now, starting from even before the pandemic, but the figure…
Whatever happened at the Spring Meetings?
Ministers, central bankers, officials and civil society activists returning home from Washington after the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund held in April 2023 were not clear as to what the outcomes of the meetings,…
Threats to the Hegemony of the Dollar
Janet Yellen, the US treasury secretary, has finally acknowledged what has been obvious to most people for quite some time, namely that the imposition of sanctions against countries that the US is hostile to, runs the risk of jeopardising the…
The Current State of India’s Economy
Government officials never tire of repeating that India is currently the fastest growing major economy in the world. What they never mention is the fact that India had witnessed perhaps the sharpest absolute drop in GDP among the major economies…
OPEC+ and Capitalism’s Fight against Inflation
Except in war-time, capitalism invariably seeks to control inflation by creating a recession; and this is so even when the inflation has been caused by an autonomous increase in capitalists’ profit-margins which are downward inflexible and hence would not be…
The Rubber Farmers’ Woes
Rubber prices, which had recovered a little after the fall during the pandemic, have collapsed again, with the farmers in Kerala, which grows 80 per cent of the country’s rubber crop, being badly hit. The central government has flatly refused…
A Common Misconception about Capitalism
There is a commonly-held view that while capitalism in its early stages brings about unemployment and hence an accentuation of poverty, this initial damage is subsequently reversed as it keeps growing. The unemployed get largely absorbed into the ranks of…