‘Government money that’s gone into vaccine development is being privatized by a handful of companies’ CounterSpin interview with James Love on Bill Gates & vaccine patent politics Janine Jackson Counterspin May 12, 2020
‘No one wants to work anymore’: the truth behind this unemployment benefits myth Amanda Holpuch The Guardian May 7, 2021
US employees are concerned about safety, others have caregiving responsibilities and some are using their job loss as an opportunity to find other work.
Today, the “wretched of the earth” are no longer those oppressed by colonization, but rather the unemployed and the working poor, migrants and refugees, landless peasants depending on public or familial assistance to survive—in a word, the economically useless.
Uselessness is the most pernicious form of inequality, because it drives these men and women into traps of poverty from which escape is all but impossible.
Drawing on economic theory, political philosophy, and demographic and scientific projections on human population and natural resources throughout the twenty-first century, renowned economist and author Pierre-Noël Giraud exposes the alarming ways that the rise of uselessness defined as such—not only lack of value in a labor market, but also the inability to independently improve one’s own standing—fuels the global resurgence of populism, engendering social and political risks from demagoguery and intolerance to mass migrations and civil war.
Like environmental change, economic uselessness is a reality from which nations and societies can no longer hide—and it is this urgency that may show us the way forward. The Useless Man concludes with a series of carefully reasoned recommendations concerning nature and climate, globalization, and finance, all evaluating potential public policies by how effectively they stand to stem the growth of uselessness.
A lucid assessment of our current geopolitical situation and a stirring forecast of what will happen if we fail to act quickly and collaboratively on a global scale, The Useless Man is an essential, compassionate addition to the debate around economic inequality and its political consequences.
Pierre-Noël Giraud is professor of economics at Mines ParisTech, Paris Dauphine University, and the EMINES School of Industrial Management in Morocco, as well as a member of the National Academy of Technologies of France. He is the author of a number of landmark books on economics, of which The Useless Man is the first published in English.
Harmful Economics will publish a review of The Useless Man when one becomes available. The text above is from the publisher’s website.
Why we let white-collar criminals get away with their crimes Review by James B. Stewart New York Times September 29, 2020
America has mistreated Its coal miners. Here’s their fight for justice. Reviewed by Hector Tobar New York Times August 18, 2020
Cover of Soul Full of Coal Dust by Chris Hamby Credit: Little Brown and Company
Mnuchin to end key Fed emergency programs, limiting Biden Jeanna Smialek and Alan Rappeport New York Times November 19, 2020
The Treasury Department asked the Federal Reserve to return unused funds, downsizing the next secretary’s ability to restart the economic support.
A revealing report on the mid-March financial crisis Nick Beams World Socialist Web Site November 19, 2020 See the Financial Stability Board’s full report (60 page PDF file)
As the Financial Times noted in a report on the crisis in September: “The US government bond market is akin to the investment world’s bomb shelter, a safe space where everyone can seek refuge when the rest of the financial system is exploding. In March, the bomb shelter itself started to rumble ominously.”
According to the FSB report, the crisis was set off when foreign investors, primarily central banks, sold off almost $300 billion worth of US Treasury debt. “Market dysfunction” was then exacerbated by “substantial sales” of US Treasuries as speculative and highly-leveraged trades, based on taking advantage of the difference between the price of Treasury bonds and their futures, became loss-making.
The large-scale unwinding of these trades, amounting to $90 billion during March, was “likely one of the contributors to a short period of extreme illiquidity on government bond markets,” the report said.
The storm lasted for a “short period” not because of any self-correction mechanism in financial markets but only as a result of the massive intervention by the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks that prevented a meltdown of the entire financial system going far beyond what took place in 2008.
A hedge fund bailout highlights how regulators ignored big risks Jeanna Smialek and Deborah B. Solomon New York Times July 24, 2020
The Dodd-Frank financial law succeeded at making banks safer, but empowered shadowy corners of finance that nearly wrecked the system in March.
Businesses are supposed to cut debt in a downturn. Why not now? Matt Phillips New York Times July 20, 2020
The Federal Reserve’s efforts to stabilize markets have touched off an even bigger borrowing binge than corporate America was already on. Investors have been so emboldened by the Fed’s actions that even companies viewed as especially risky are having no problem borrowing heavily…. The low costs of borrowing will inevitably keep some companies alive that would otherwise have gone bankrupt this year, creating a class of so-called zombie companies that stagger along but are too weak to invest and grow while sucking up cash that could be put to better use elsewhere.