Poverty prize

Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer have been jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in economics (or to be more exact, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in memory of Alfred Nobel) for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.  Banerjee and Duflo — a couple both at work and in their private life — are professors

Capitalism – not so alone

Branko Milanovic is the world’s leading expert on global inequality i.e the differences in income and wealth between countries and between individuals in different countries. He was a former chief economist at the World Bank.  After leaving the bank, Milanovic wrote a definitive study on global inequality which was updated in a later paper in 2013 and finally

Knowledge commodities

In the Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, Thomas Rotta and Rodrigo Teixeira have a chapter called the commodification of knowledge and information.  In this chapter, they argue that knowledge is ‘immaterial labour’ and ‘knowledge commodities’ are increasingly replacing material commodities in modern capitalism. “Examples of knowledge- commodities are all sorts of commodified data, computer software,

A global manufacturing recession

As we enter October, the global recession is with us – in manufacturing.  The PMI manufacturing activity indexes for most of the major economies are below 50, the threshold for expansion or contraction.  These are only surveys of corporate managers asking them about production, sales, employment etc.  But PMIs have been reasonably accurate indicators of

A rent-seeking economy?

‘Financialisation’ has been promoted by heterodox economists as the cause of the iniquities and failures of modern capitalist economies.  Now an additional theory has been offered: ‘renterisation’. In a recent long article in the British Financial Times, its well-known economic columnist, Martin Wolf, offered this concept as the explanation of low productivity growth, rising inequality

You can take a horse to water but….

Last Thursday, Mario Draghi, the current head of the European Central bank, soon to be replaced by Christine Lagarde from the IMF, announced a parting gift to banks and financial markets.  The ECB decided to reintroduce its bond purchasing programme in order to inject yet more billions into Europe’s banks in order to persuade them

Theft or exploitation?- a review of Stolen by Grace Blakeley

All our wealth has been stolen by big finance and in doing so big finance has brought our economy to its knees.  So we must save ourselves from big finance.  That is the shorthand message of a new book, Stolen – how to save the world from financialisation, by Grace Blakeley. Grace Blakeley is a

Climate change and mitigation

There is a new IMF paper out on climate change and what policy instruments are available to do something about it. I write this post from Brazil, where the fires in the Amazon rage on and the Bolsonaro government ignores this catastrophe and even welcomes it as a way of clearing the land for more

The trade trigger

Financial markets globally continue to gyrate on any news about the trade war between the US and China.  When President Trump announced that the Chinese had called him during the G7 summit meeting in Biarritz to agree on talks on a trade deal, the stock markets rose.  Within hours after China said no such call

It’s all going pear-shaped

With perfect timing, just as the summit meeting of the leaders of the top capitalist economies (G7) met in Biarritz, France, China announced a new round of tariffs on $75bn of US imported goods. This was in retaliation to a new planned round of tariffs on Chinese goods that the US planned for December. US