A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse. David Graeber [from The Baffler No. 22, 2013] What is a revolution?
We used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just society. Nowadays, we live in an age when, if rebel armies do come sweeping into a city, or mass uprisings overthrow a dictator, it’s unlikely to have any such implications; when profound social transformation does occur—as with, say, the rise of feminism—it’s likely to take an entirely different form. At moments like this, it generally pays to go back to the history one already knows and ask: Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be?
Already by the time of the French Revolution, Wallerstein notes, there was a single world market, and increasingly a single world political system as well, dominated by the huge colonial empires. Future Stop. CrowdFunding/CrowdSourcing. Why bankers are intellectually naked. A definitive explanation of the industry’s economics warns the causes of the financial crisis have not gone away and will return The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do About It, by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig, Princeton, RRP£19.95, RRP$29.95 The UK’s Independent Commission on Banking, of which I was a member, made a modest proposal: the proportion of the balance sheet of UK retail banks that has to be funded by equity, instead of debt, should be raised to 4 per cent.
This would be just a percentage point above the figure suggested by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. The government rejected this, because of lobbying by the banks. Why might even so tiny an increase in the equity-funded proportion of the balance sheet be objectionable? If you think that running banks with so little loss-absorbing equity is crazy, you are right. It makes no sense to build either bridges or banks sure to collapse in the first big storm. Economy. Opinion, Commentary, Op-ed from Today's Top Economists, Public Intellectuals and Thought Leaders. Are concerns over inflation inflated? Legal Forgery Introduction. Positive Money Conference - Home » Positive Money. BBC World Service - More Or Less, The Parable of the Ox. Ngaire Woods: 'IMF have learnt lessons of austerity' The International Monetary Fund's top economist, Olivier Blanchard, has acknowledged that the fund blew its forecasts for Greece and other European economies because it did not fully understand how government austerity efforts would undermine economic growth.
In October 2012 the IMF admitted austerity measures were causing economic damage which was as much as three times the amount originally forecast. And in this latest paper, they are standing by their initial conclusions, but say the harshest impact of those programmes may be fading as economies start to recover. Professor Ngaire Woods, former independent advisor to IMF European Regional Advisory Group, told Today business presenter Simon Jack that the IMF have "learnt the lessons of austerity over the last 20 years in other countries.
" She added that the IMF are stressing "any country that can, should slow down austerity, [and] shouldn't do it as one big bang upfront, because the results on the economy will produce a vicious cycle...