In search of some background on the  “Occupy Wall Street†movement, I recently caught up with Rick Wolff. He is a progressive economist and rising alternative  media celeb in NYC (you can hear  his entertaining weekly radio discussion of economic news at http://rdwolff.com/). He (with others like Stiglitz) among other spoke to the Occupy Wall Street teach-in on Tuesday. Below […]
Read moreOn Bloomberg today is a piece by George Magnus, senior economic advisor at UBS, on the relevance of Marxian ideas. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-29/give-marx-a-chance-to-save-the-world-economy-commentary-by-george-magnus.html Policy makers struggling to understand the barrage of financial panics, protests and other ills afflicting the world would do well to study the works of a long-dead economist: Karl Marx. The sooner they recognize we’re facing a once-in-a-lifetime crisis […]
Read moreToday (June 15th) the Toronto Star broke news that the NDP was planning to drop the term “socialism†from its party’s platform. This was a mere formality of what had been in existence for decades: the party hasn’t been “socialist†in any shape or form for a very long time. On the very same day, new data emerged from the […]
Read moreI was watching CNBC and happened to see this panel about how the number of Americans killed by natural disasters has declined over time. It was also noted that, in early 2010, fewer people died in Chile’s earthquake than in Haiti’s earthquake. The discussion quite reasonably outlined how improvements in emergency preparedness, building codes, and infrastructure help to protect people […]
Read morePEF members Louis-Philippe Rochon and Mario Seccareccia have organized a conference on “Contemporary Capitalism: Its Financial Circuits, Its Transformation and Future Prospects†on May 31 and June 1 in Ottawa, right before the PEF summer school and Canadian Economics Association conference. Click here for the program. For more information, please contact lprochon2003 [a] yahoo.com
Read more“The already wealthy have emerged from the global recession in an even wealthier position. What does the rise of global elites mean to power and influence at home and abroad?” That’s the blurb from TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin, the latest Canadian news show to tackle the issue that explains so much of what is going on: rising inequality. […]
Read moreIt has been fascinating to watch the growing public reaction to the full-court press from Canada’s Big Pipe companies (aka, the telcos and cablecos) for usage-based billing (internet metering). The CRTC has played a corporatist role that has largely been compliant with the demands of industry. Even in the midst of the turning political tide, the CRTC seems more interested […]
Read moreGabriella Moldonado looked like someone who was thoroughly whipped by life. This past October I was standing on the front stoop of her sagging home in Laredo, Texas, interviewing the middle-aged, portly woman for a television documentary about Mexico’s drug cartel wars. Laredo is a city of 230,000 that lies on the Rio Grande river just across from Mexico. It […]
Read moreOver at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Stephen Gordon argues that capitalists are not rich. Of course, wealth is more or less synonymous with owning things that can be broadly defined as capital. Stephen’s argument is focused on income: “If capital income is concentrated among high earners, then it could still be argued that increasing labour’s share of income will reduce inequality.†[…]
Read moreCan socialism be revived? Does it have a chance to gain some traction ever again? Unfortunately, the two great experiments in socialism attempted during the last century – social democracy and the Stalinist model of state-controlled socialism – are now spent forces. In respect to sweeping capitalism into the dustbin of history, they both failed. And socialism as an ideological, […]
Read moreI would venture there are three reasons why social democracy is pretty much kaput: 1) a flawed ideology 2) the power of capital and 3) a propensity for selling out and drifting to the right. 1) Flawed ideology Ever since people have exploited other people’s labour for their personal gain, it’s long been the dream of the slave, serf, peasant […]
Read moreRob Ford, a belligerent right-wing serial liar with a proclivity for infantile temper tantrums and drunkenness, was elected mayor of Toronto this past week. Handily. This was after seven years of competent and scandal-free leadership by an NDP mayor, David Miller. The man Miller endorsed to replace him was a long-time NDP councilor renowned for his decency and sterling public […]
Read moreFrom time to time, I check out the The Real News Network. I’ve just finished watching a video clip they’ve featured on labour protests in France over the government’s attempt to raise the “pension age” from 60 to 62. The coverage includes a brief look at the impact of the blockades of French oil refineries. I’m struck by how powerful the French […]
Read moreThe Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, is an important book. It is not a huge tome, as one might expect from such a broad topic, weighing in at just 265 pages of text (including lots of figures mapping inequality against some health and social statistic, and some clever cartoons). […]
Read moreAs if there weren’t already enough reasons to eliminate the egregious stock option tax loophole, a column by Eric Reguly in this month’s Report on Business magazine highlights yet another. This reason helps to explain why we had such a booming stock market up to 2008, but little growth in real investment and productivity. First of all, the stock option […]
Read morePerhaps by now you have seen the TV commercials for Bell touting its much faster 3G network for web phones. Rogers is suing on the basis that Bell is basically making this up. What’s interesting about it, though, is that Bell, Telus and others entering the web phone (or should we just say iPhone) business are not seeking to compete […]
Read moreOn the eve of the Whitehorse meeting of Finance Ministers in December, the Howe released a report co-authored by Bill Robson which charged that the federal government’s pension plan liabilities on behalf of its own employees are greatly under-stated – to the tune of $58 billion. This sum should, he argued, be added to the federal public debt. http://www.cdhowe.org/pdf/backgrounder_122.pdf As […]
Read moreLast night, I saw the North American premiere of Michael Moore’s latest movie at the Toronto International Film Festival. Ironically, it was held in the Visa Screening Room, which grants preferential access to bearers of Visa Gold, Platinum or Infinite credit cards. (The unwashed masses who use MasterCard, AMEX or lower grades of Visa waited in a separate line.) While […]
Read morePosted below is my Globe and Mail column this week raising questions about whether troubled companies can really “cut their way to viability.” When companies face trouble, the knee-jerk response is always to cut back: close plants, reduce headcount, cut compensation. Reflecting their shorter-term time horizon (and their consequent hunger for a faster payback), financial markets favour the most determined […]
Read morePEF people are not the only ones who correctly anticipated some of our recent economic and fiscal events. Jamie Galbraith also saw a lot of this coming in his book The Predator State. With no further ado, I’m posting an enthusiastic review of the book by fellow traveler and Sorbonne PhD economics graduate Henry Sader:
Read moreI highly recommend “The Credit Crunch: Housing Bubbles, Globalisation and the Worldwide Economic Crisis” by Graham Turner. “Graham Turner is one of only a handful of economists to understand the roots of the current financial crisis, its implications for all of us and crucially what should be done now. I strongly recommend you read this book.” —Larry Elliott, Guardian “A […]
Read moreHere’s the full version of the summary posted earlier – a much longer analytical section, and more detail on our suggested policy response. http://canadianlabour.ca/en/clc-response-economic-crisis-full-version CLC Response to the Economic Crisis Global capitalism: on the edge of the abyss Dramatic recent events have thrown into sharp relief some chronic and long-standing problems of our global and national economic system: an over-developed […]
Read moreI was intrigued by what is happening in Iceland, so the following is a piece I’ve written on it. It has some introductory macro-economics in it, which I think it is good to keep in perspective as we consider the frantic attempts being made to prevent an economic depression. The economic and financial collapse of 2008 is shaping up to be […]
Read moreJames Galbraith bats this one out of the park: Years ago, I realized that the free-market, supply-side crowd, true conservatives who’d ridden high with Reagan, dislike Bush as much as I do. I speak of the hard money, low-tax, Wall Street Journal, deregulate-and-privatize team, the nemeses of my youth, people like Bruce Bartlett, Paul Craig Roberts, the late Jude Wanniski. […]
Read moreWas it just me or did others get a nagging feeling about the intent behind Air Canada’s surprise announcement of 2,000 layoffs yesterday? The media coverage played along the lines of their press release, with a strong focus on the rising cost of fuel. This is certainly an issue, together with the impact of the higher Canadian dollar and the […]
Read moreMost environmentalists would probably say no. But I’m going to make the opposite case here. The thing we need to remember about economic growth is that over long periods of time the products we consume and the processes by which we produce them change dramatically. As my old prof Dick Lipsey pointed out repeatedly, we have a higher standard of […]
Read moreI just love the way “free markets” work. Here is a classic example of price “stickiness.” In Ontario I have the privilege of purchasing my gas from an independent supplier under a fixed term/fixed price contract, or at a fluctuating price from my distributor, Enbridge. The rational economist in me tells me that it should make no real difference whether […]
Read morehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2177006,00.html An interesting column – roots of the crisis are seen to lie in the continual injections of financial liquidity required to keep growth going in a global economy with a serious underlying deflationary bias, the result of excess capacity in manufacturing. “Merely cutting the cost of borrowing will do little to remedy the long-term weaknesses of the advanced economies” […]
Read moreI’ve pasted in below quite an interesting analysis of the current financial crisis, by Pierre Habbard of the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD. The Charts have gone missing but are not essential. Financialisation and the “sub-prime†financial crisis – Issues for future regulation TUAC Secretariat Paris, 5 September 2007 The phenomenal growth of the derivative […]
Read moreAn interesting story in The Tyee that picks up on evidence from the Conrad Black Trial (from a story in the Globe as blogged here), and runs with it. It is a telling insider story, one that nicely clears up the difference between the notion of competitive markets and the real world of capitalism and Big Media conglomerates: How Black […]
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