Category Archives: Globalization

Will US Browbeating of Japan Revive the Zombified TransPacific Partnership?

As readers may recall, we declared the toxic, national-sovereignty-gutting, misnamed “trade” deal called the TransPacific Partnership to be dead based on America’s colossal mishandling of Japan (not that it has handled the other prospective signatories any better, mind you). The pact was designed to be an “everybody but China” grouping, a centerpiece of Obama’s pivot to Asia. Japan’s participation is essential to meeting that objective, as well as to another critical objective: that of getting major nations to sign up to agreements that subordinated national regulations to the profit-making rights of foreign investors, who could sue governments over any incursions in secretive, conflicted arbitration panels.

Nevertheless, meetings on the TransPacific Partnership continue, with the latest round in Sydney last week. The US press is depicting the Japanese as bad guys who can be browbeaten into giving up protecting their beef and rice farmers, among others. Is that likely to happen?

New Zealand’s GT Group in Romania, Moldova and the UK

Shady NZ shell company merchant GT Group’s global footprint just keeps growing, as do its links to the dreamy nonsense that is the “Maharal Network”. In our latest global tour, let’s visit Romania and Moldova first, via Ukraine and New Zealand.

LinkedIn’s “Economic Graph” as Algorithmic, Global Labor Brokerage and Panopticon

Silicon Valley labor law violator LinkedIn has a vision — “the Economic Graph” — and it’s sponsoring a $25,000 contest to find “researchers, academics, and data-driven thinkers” to help them make it a reality.[1] Here’s the vision in short form: There are approximately 3 billion people in the global workforce. LinkedIn’s vision is to create […]

The Mixed International Picture on Poverty and Inequality

Yves here. As much as readers may already have an intuitive grasp of the story told in this post, data can help define its contours better. Here we see that the rising tide of global growth has not lifted all boats. The gains of the once-poor in China and India have come at the expense of the what used to be the middle class in more developed countries. Reducing poverty has not been a zero sum game. This post also omits another key piece: the rise and rise of an uber-wealthy class.

Bono: Tax Haven Salesman for the Celtic Paper Tiger

Yves here. Pop star Bono is a case study in hypocrisy thanks to his use of corporate-friendly tax dodges and and advocacy of creating tax havens as a viable form of economic development. Ireland exemplifies of how well, as in badly, this approach has worked.

Michael Perelman: Globalization, “Free Trade,” and Food as a Strategic Weapon

Yves here. Michael Perelman gave a wide-ranging talk in Ankara called the Anarchy of Globalization which focused on the local impact of globalization. The presentation was wideranging and included a discussion of the evolution of usage and theoretical concerns.

We’ve extracted a section below, on the role of “free trade” agreements and one of their not-widely-recognized side effects, that of weakening food security. The case study is Mexico.

Ukraine Blowback: Will Australia, Brazil, and Russia Lose Out to Africa as Low Cost Suppliers of Iron Ore?

Yves here, as John Helmer explains in this post, one of the many focuses of economic warfare between the US and Russia is production of iron ore, in which Russia is a large player. Helmer describes how Urkaine is pushing to produce iron ore at the minehead, which means in Africa. Not only would Russia suffer, but Australia and Brazil would take collateral damage.

David Quentin and Nicholas Shaxson: The “Patent Box” – Proof That the UK is a Rogue State in Corporate Tax

Yves here. We are delighted to welcome two world-recognized tax experts as writers on our site. They also happen to fall in the minority that believes that paying taxes is the price of civilization. And to top it off, they write in a layperson-friendly yet technically accurate manner.

Battling to Curb “Vulture Funds”

Yves here. Martin Khor focuses on the alarm created by the ruling against Argentina that allowed a Paul Singer’s NML, a vulture fund with a small position in Argentina’s bonds, to vitiate a hard-fought bond restructuring. The particularly ugly part that don’t get the attention warranted is that it is widely believed that Singer took a much larger position in credit default swaps, meaning he was seeking to create and betting on an Argentine default. And another ugly wrinkle is the role of private law in these processes. ISDA, a private organization, determines what is an event of default for credit default swaps.

Singer was on the committee that voted whether Argentina was in default (recall it had made payment under the restructuring to the trustee, Bank of New York, but BONY was barred by the court from remitting payment to the bondholders). This gave him a direct say in an event in which he had a large economic interest. And that was no lucky accident.

G20 Finance Ministers Reveal Impotence in the Face of Rising Stresses

Yves here. It’s hardly uncommon for big international pow-wows like the G20 to produce grand-sounding statements that when read carefully call for unthreatening, which usually means inconsequential, next steps. But this G20 just past was revealing, in a bad way, about the state of international political economy.

The Scottish Independence Vote: Views From a Distant Half-Scot

No-one’s quite sure what Scotland is, nor what independence is, but they’re all for it anyway, or against it.

Investor Dispute Settlement: A Rogue Corporation in the World Bank’s Rogue Tribunal

Lambert here: Even if Pacific Rim were the most public-spirited of global corporations, a fluffy lamb among the wolves, and even if El Salvador were, oh, notoriously crooked, corrupt, and infested with fraudsters at every level of government, surely Americans across the political spectrum would take issue with a lawsuit between the two being decided […]

Don Quijones: Judge Turns Monsanto’s Mexican GMO Dream Into Legal Nightmare

Yves here. The success of seed companies in extracting rents from farmers, particularly in countries where subsistence farming is widespread, is yet another example of how corporations like Monsanto abuse intellectual property laws and monopoly/oligopoly power. For the most part, governments have by their inaction backed this scheme. And that’s before you get to the fact that GMO crops, as a former NIH biomedical researcher stressed to me, is a massive experiment being conducted on the public at large without consent or controls.

Don Quijones reports on a ruling in Mexico that has, at least for the moment, thrown a spanner in the seed companies’ plans by barring field trials of GMO crops due to environmental risks.

New Zealand Companies Office’s $612Mn Money-Laundering Snooze

The Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project recently (21st August) published one of their periodic investigations, concerning a rather large moneylaundering scheme: Call it the Laundromat. It’s a complex system for laundering more than $20 billion in Russian money stolen from the government by corrupt politicians or earned through organized crime activity. It was designed to not only […]