Category Archives: Globalization

Trade Deals Must Allow for Regulating Finance

Yves here. In serious policy discussions, the rules of engagement are to to take rationales offered by each side at face value. So as useful as this article is in setting forth some high level but well supported reasons why the provisions of the Trans Pacific Partnership that would weaken financial regulations are a bad idea, it also has the unfortunate side effective of reinforcing a false narrative about the TPP and its European cousin. These pacts are not about trade. Trade is already substantially liberalized. Weakening national regulation is their main objective.

Yanis Varoufakis: What Merkel’s Third Term Means for Europe

Yves here. Varoufakis gives a high-level overview of the political and economic constraints on Merkel in dealing with the festering Eurocrisis. While many of the political issues have received decent coverage in the English language press, the nature and severity of Germany’s economic challenges have gotten scant notice.

Robert Reich, Inequality’s Intellectual Fraudster

Now it may seem churlish to take on a prominent former government official making a star turn to publicize one of the most pressing social and political problems in America, namely, our ever widening levels of inequality. But in fact, Reich is not only selling the equivalent of patent medicine as the remedy but he’s even getting commissions from some of the snake-oil manufacturers.

Mathew D. Rose: Good News for Merkel is Not Necessarily Good News for Europe

The German word for election, Wahlen, comes from the word “choice”, and in this general election there wasn’t really one. And that’s too bad for the rest of Europe.

The G20 St. Petersburg Summit: Bubbles, Casinos, and Inactivity

By Sameer Dossani, an advocacy coordinator at ActionAid International, a development NGO dedicated to ending poverty. Cross posted from Triple Crisis

While much of the media coverage around the G20 leaders summit has been about the failure of international diplomacy in Syria, the formal agenda was around one issue: growth. But focusing on growth is a bit like treating strep throat with asprin. You may alleviate some of the symptoms, but you’re not treating the source of the problem.

Gaius Publius: Are We Having “Bank Deregulation” Crises or “Unrestricted Capital Flow” Crises?

Yves here. For the last four years, we’ve been highlighting research that has found that high levels of international capital flows are strongly associated with frequent and severe financial crises. Gaius describes how more economists are endorsing this idea, and how the proposed trade deals, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the US-EU trade agreement, will only make matters worse.

David Dayen: Productivity Rose 7.7% Post-Great Recession; Workers Have Seen None of It

I’ve said this before in other venues, but this really is the chart that explains modern America:

How the Pending Trans-Pacific Partnership and EU-US Trade Deals Will Gut National Regulations, Hurt Budgets, and Undermine Sovereignity

Yves here. We’ve written from time time about the latest plans underway to further degrade the lives of ordinary citizens in order to fatten the bottom lines of major multinationals, namely, two major US-led international trade pacts. Even though the US media has given these pending deals scant attention, they represent a far-reaching effort to restructure basic legal and regulatory frameworks.

Michael Klare: The Third Carbon Age – Drop the Fantasy of a Coming Era of Renewable Energy

Yves here. To put none too fine a point on it, the most important steps to reduce carbon emissions would be a Marshall plan level effort to reconfigure living and resourcing arrangements so as to reduce energy demands, and to go particularly aggressively after the worst polluters (for instance, the cars you see spewing fumes, are surprisingly large contributors to total emissions from automobiles). But it’s much easier to go the Easter Island route and keep carrying on more or less as before until you hit insurmountable constraints.

Fiscal Crises: Coming To A City Near You?

The sad fact of the matter is that Detroit suffers today from international trade and international financial policies of the past two decades that many leading international economists embraced.

James Galbraith on Social Breakdown and Financial Stress in Europe and Why the Word “Stimulus” Needs to be Banned

Yanis Varoufakis provided the English translation of a new interview with James Galbraith published in Suddeutsche Zeitung. Galbraith focuses on institutional arrangements, the need for restructuring and reform, and constraints on growth.

TransPacific Partnership to Let Foreign Investors Gut Regulations, Keep Big Ag Subsidies

Only a small part of the TransPacific Partnership is about trade as such. Most chapters are on other issues, like services, investment, government procurement, disciplines on state-owned enterprises and intellectual property.

Joining the TPP or similar free trade agreements will mean the country having to make often drastic changes to existing policies, laws and regulations, which will in turn affect the domestic economy and society.

Wolf Richter: Blinded By Optimism, German Economy Now Below Stall Speed

The financial crisis was brutal for Germany, but the recovery was steep. A key element is the relentless drive to export. But the German “success recipe” looks to be losing its luster.