Speech delivered at the International Conference on the Global Crisis and Hegemonic Dilemmas (New Delhi, Nov.8-10). Is the world economy really recovering or just pretending to recover? Boris Kagarlitsky analyses the question through the example of Russia, and argues that we are just witnessing a postponement of the crisis, since the tools used to mitigate it are not addressing its root causes.
In English at least, “waste” as a noun means rubbish, whatever can’t or won’t be used and is only good for the waste bin. The verb “to waste” has more subtle varieties: one meaning is to be profligate, to squander or make inefficient and uneconomical use of a resource. But to “lay waste” is to devastate, for example when an army or a barbarian horde lays waste a city. In gangland slang, to... Read more
Remember how the doctrines of market omniscience, infallibility and self-regulation and the dangers of state interference in the financial industry were suddenly revealed as treacherous myths? How investment bankers stopped telling people what they did for a living? How public fury at massive bailouts and bonuses seemed for a moment ready to explode in unpredictable directions?... Read more
Has the world economy begun firmly and unambiguously recovering from the Great Recession, the worst global economic slowdown since the Great Depression of the 1930s? Two years on, the answer would appear to be, not quite; the repair is incomplete, uncertain, fragile and reversible. Many perceptive economists do not rule out a “double dip”, a second sharp fall in output in the industrially... Read more
Two years ago, Europe was in the midst of a wave of similar bailouts that would reach at least €3 trillion Euros by 2009. The difference then though, was the contrition expressed by former cheerleaders for bank liberalisation, who asked pardon for their former dogmatic insistence on minimising regulation and even admitted that corporations could not be trusted to act in... Read more
Son muchas las pruebas que, en la actualidad, demuestran la inviabilidad del capitalismo como modo de organización de la vida económica. Uno de sus máximos apologistas, el economista austríaco-americano Joseph Schumpeter, gustaba argumentar que lo que lo caracterizaba era un continuo proceso de “destrucción creadora”: viejas formas de producción o de organización de la vida económica eran... Read more
En el Área de la Bahía de San Francisco, el Valle Central de California, Los Ángeles, la ciudad de Nueva York, Washington DC, Miami y otras regiones que he visitado durante el año pasado, fui testigo de un enorme incremento de la pobreza.El desempleo ha crecido mientras los presupuestos para la salud y la educación han recibido el pase de la cuchilla –así como los departamentos de bomberos y de... Read more
I’ve visited the San Francisco Bay Area, California’s Central Valley, Los Angeles, New York City, Washington DC, Miami and other areas over the last year. In each one, I witnessed a notable increase in poverty.Unemployment has increased while health and education budgets have received the blow of the ax – along with fire and police departments. Welfare? Forget it! I note the growing number of... Read more
