The other major consequence of the Coronavirus!
July 28, 2020Covid-19 has caused a run on cash, at least from the moment that the fears started to grip our Western societies. Intuitively, it is however the opposite of what we might have imagined. Weren’t there fears – albeit justified – that the illness could be transmitted by certain objects? Isn’t this why there…
The duty of financial intervention
July 16, 2020Might international finance be supporting and facilitating the work of dictators and autocrats? It is in fact not a lack of funding that could, for example, depose Jacob Zuma in South Africa, but rather his own party being put under intense pressure by a population that is wrought with wide-scale corruption orchestrated by Zuma…
Working 4 days to work better
June 30, 2020After the health crisis – and even while it still looms over us – the 4-day work week will undeniably be a viable path to take to rebuild economies. However, our Western societies don’t have – or rather no longer have – the means to put it in place. Since the great financial crisis…
May this crisis be an opportunity!
June 15, 2020For the common good, but also purely and simply for the preservation of capitalism, this crisis must be got to grips with because the cause and effect relationship between the accumulation of debt and inequalities is, for me, at the source of it all. The fact is that the drop in debt for the…
700 years of interest rates to predict the future
June 8, 2020The bankers of Florence – the inventors of modern finance –imposed a two-figure interest rate in return for their loans. The usurer Shylock, in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, was happy with 8%, whereas this service charge on debt had fallen to around 4% at the start of World War One, and is now at…
Austerity is not an inevitability !
May 18, 2020You are greatly mistaken if you think Europe’s woes to come will be caused by a liquidity crisis. It is in fact a solvency crisis that poses an imminent threat to many members of the Union who don’t really need their funding costs to decrease, but who are desperately in search of transfers and…
This might not be a crisis!
May 9, 2020The comparison between the Covid-19-stamped economic crisis and the 2007-2008 crisis is fascinating. Do you remember: at the time, the real economy was suffering the direct consequences of an overindebted banking system that made heavy use of leverage. Faced with this existential threat, the response was rather classic, in that it consisted of creating…
The Monetary Theory of Happiness
April 29, 2020A government that puts its monetary system to the service of its citizens and businesses views money as an instrument to improve their prosperity. In the absence of this belief, government action is ineffective or effective for just a minority. This degenerates into “poverty in the midst of plenty” to quote Keynes, who illustrated…
The death of money, as you once knew it
April 21, 2020I’ve been saying it for years: the use of cash is on its way out and the Coronavirus will be the final nail in its coffin. There’s no point in fighting against an inevitable phenomenon because the use of banknotes will more or less have disappeared from our intertwined economies – including China –…
Covid-China-19: we will not forget
April 15, 2020It is the efforts made towards China by what is called the global community that allowed the country, over a few decades, to successfully implement its reforms. The normalisation of relations between the US and China, inaugurated in 1979 by President Carter, was in fact the starting point of an open relationship of reformatory…