Great Britain : dissolution of an empire
September 26, 2022Between 1765 and 1938, Britain stole $ 45 trillion from India, according to calculations by historian Utsa Patnaik. The colonizing power was able to impose an absolute monopoly on the trade of the subcontinent through the intermediary of the East India Company whose attributions consisted in buying their goods from the Indians with their…
Black Wednesday, 30 years ago: A British humiliation
September 19, 2022September 16, 1992 marks the 30th anniversary of the ejection of the Pound Sterling from the European Monetary System (EMS), described as a “disastrous day” by then Prime Minister John Major, who never recovered politically. . Then Chancellor of the Exchequer, who had persuaded 7 years earlier his boss a hardly enthusiastic Margaret Thatcher,…
Checkmate for Russia?
September 10, 2022The oil price cap decided a few days ago by the G7 is an original, unprecedented measure to be taken very seriously. The member countries of this exclusive club will therefore refuse to buy its oil from Russia at a price that will exceed a certain level which will be fixed later. Surely Russia…
I want you to panic
September 1, 2022Canada is a breadbasket: it is the 4th largest exporter of grains and vegetables in the world. This country also has one of the most efficient harvesting techniques available. However, its food stalls will no longer be as well stocked, and this in the near future, because the federal government has just decreed a…
Greece not playing along
August 31, 2022Russian oil is mainly transported by Greek cargo ships (here in blue). Greece is taking a huge risk in aiding the violation of sanctions in this way. Isn’t our European Union harmonious?
German strategy
August 30, 2022Very interesting this substantial decline in road traffic in favor of rail in Germany from the moment the universal train ticket at 9 euros was instituted. That’s right: travelling/moving around becomes accessible again to those who couldn’t afford it.
Putin and the european chaos
August 21, 2022They were all grossly wrong, those who predicted a collapse in Russian oil production. Putin effectively defied all forecasts because, with 10.8 million barrels/day (mb/d) pumped last July, Russian oil production is almost at the level of 11 mb/d last January, i.e. before the war. In fact, it has been three months since this…
Germany: a country undone
August 5, 2022The energy crisis is upsetting the balance of power in Europe, as we finally have realised that Germany is indeed quite fallible. The country’s moral authority was constantly being unleashed upon Mario Draghi during his time as president of the ECB because of his active monetary policy. Germany’s arrogance went as far as proposing…
Néolibéralisme et inflation
August 1, 2022Les tarifs du blé de retour à leurs niveaux d’avant le conflit en Ukraine…laquelle guerre n’est donc pas la responsable principale de cette flambée des prix. Mais alors : qui aura le courage de questionner ces augmentations brutales de tous les prix ? Par exemple, pourquoi les tomates ont-elles augmenté de 40 à 60% alors que…
Shinzo Abe: killed for being a Keynesian
July 10, 2022He lifted his country out of the pacifist dogma adopted following World War Two. He contributed massively to Japan’s transformation into a country careful with its geopolitical and strategic interests so it could it take up the seat it deserved at the table of global security operations. He was called a fascist by certain…
Deglobalisation on the Move
July 5, 2022While democracy wasn’t supposed to win every time, rationality and good economic sense were. The world of business and trade were to enjoy the kind of prosperity inspired by the Big Bang i.e. an expansion that has only the world as its limit. And every nation, every company and every group of individuals…
Sorry, we’ve run out of ammo
June 18, 2022Inflation and deflation lead to the same conclusion: the loss of buying power. Up until the very recent past, deflation was caused by outsourcing to developing nations combined with rising global debt levels. Having tried – sometimes desperately – to revive inflation, the central banks got more than they’d bargained for but were also…
Turkey: autopsy of a debacle
May 30, 2022This country got lost in grandiose real estate projects that have turned out to be barely profitable. Instead of progressing from its economy’s developmental stage by prioritising and banking on the traditional path– which is also enticing for foreign investors –, a path that is characterised by gradual industrialisation, Turkey has preferred to enrich…
Crypto: speculation for the poor
May 19, 2022They are in no way currencies, even if the infatuation and the global greed of gain bestows upon them the flattering label of “cryptocurrencies”, in a doomed-from-the-start attempt to lend them credibility and attract punters. You need to have a tough heart and stomach to trade in such currencies with unprecedented volatility. They are…
Hunger Games
May 8, 2022Hyperglobalisation has killed us off! It makes us irreversibly dependent on each other on a global scale, so much so that punitive sanctions placed on a medium-sized country now have an impact on production chains on the other side of the planet, ending up working against those who decreed them. The Russia campaign is…
China: a disaster in the making
April 24, 2022China’s population will have been split in two by the end of this century. The reputable British scientific journal The Lancet foresees the number of Chinese people collapsing to 730 million, dropping from 1.4 billion today. Thanks to the Covid crisis, China’s birth rate has fallen by 30% in the last two years, which is…
A capitalism between consenting adults
April 16, 2022“The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. In the twenty-first century, only nations that share a commitment to protecting basic human rights and guaranteeing political and economic freedom…
A Lebanon-like scenario for Egypt?
April 5, 2022Egypt’s contemporary economic model is marked by the unprecedented enormity of its expenditure in comparison with its resources and revenues, and this has been the case since the accession to power of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. He and his government act, in fact, as if Egypt enjoyed the same kind of petrol or gas income…
Price control: a social emergency
March 31, 2022At 7.3% in March 2022, the rate of inflation in Germany is at its highest since 1981! With the situation being much the same across the whole western world – the whole world full stop even – the legitimate question of price control is now an incisive one. It is imperative to reduce this…
The lessons from Weimar
March 24, 2022Stagflation ravaged the economies of the 1970s. Candidate Jimmy Carter was able to beat Gerald Ford, the sitting president, by accusing him high and wide of having made the “misery index” worse, that being the unemployment rate and inflation added together, that was at 13 at the time. Four years later, it was Reagan…
China: financial victory without military intervention
March 22, 2022China’s currency just overtook the once almighty yen. SWIFT, the international payment system, must now use the yuan that has become the 4th biggest currency after the dollar, the euro and the Swiss franc. Long considered to be speculative, the “renminbi” seems to be undergoing a full transformation, with such volumes of transactions making it…
China: financial victory without military intervention
March 14, 2022China’s currency just overtook the once almighty yen. SWIFT, the international payment system, must now use the yuan that has become the 4th biggest currency after the dollar, the euro and the Swiss franc. Long considered to be speculative, the “renminbi” seems to be undergoing a full transformation, with such volumes of transactions making…
Where is China though?
March 6, 2022China has been deeply shocked by the butchery that the Russian economy has suffered. The leaders of China – at every level – are terrified to fall victim to such strangulation. The West has steadfastly realised that its almighty power of globalisation is – by all accounts – a weapon that it alone wields.…
Russia: a disaster, live
February 28, 2022It’s been a quite a while since Putin’s Russia stopped investing in top-of-the-range global securities, namely US Treasury Bonds. Clearly worried about freeing itself from the West’s tutelage, Russia now has only 3.7 billion dollars of US debt compared to the 177 it had in 2010. Also, Russia’s central bank possesses wealth in the…
Inflation is always and everywhere…
February 22, 2022The ghost of Milton Friedman and his oh-so-famous repartee of the 1960s when he said that inflation is “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” still haunts us today. It is true that this assertion may seem plausible. After all, the immediate consequence of inflation is a rise in prices, which are denominated in money,…
Russia: a poor power
February 8, 2022In terms of sanctions against it, Russia is particularly vulnerable when it comes to technology. Its dependency goes back a long time, to the Soviet era in fact because – despite the USSR exporting more machines and machine tools than it imported numerically-speaking – the value of these imports exceeded 7 and sometimes even…
For China, good news are bad news
January 30, 2022China’s trade surpluses are beating all their historic records. Despite the stagnation of its national consumption, China is racking up trade surpluses in the way of 94 billion dollars per month. This good news is however not so good because the strong correlation between a nation’s trade balance and its overall consumption. These enormous…
Break up the monopolies to save society
January 20, 2022Just a quarter of a century ago, the maritime industry was heavily regulated. Until a certain powerful cartel led by the three biggest ship owners in the world shook things up by convincing the American authorities to change the rules of the game. However, the 20th century had judged the maritime transport to be…
Corruption is a threat to national security
January 10, 2022While the events in Kazakhstan have taken a dramatic turn due to the dictatorial regime in place ordering troops to fire on and kill protestors, it would not go amiss to remind ourselves that it is indeed President Kazakh Nazarbayev who was the first of the post-Soviet era to weave a methodical web of…
China is folding under the weight of its own contradictions
January 3, 2022The gap between the US and China remains wide, with China’s GDP still at only 70% of America’s. Evidently, China’s economic progress has been spectacular, and in this light the 14 trillion dollars that make up China’s aggregate product is nothing short of a miracle compared to the state it was in just 20…
$: the lord almighty, our master
November 28, 202115th August 1971: surely the most important date of the 20th century for economics and finance, the day that marked the decision of US President Nixon to unpeg the dollar from gold. Taken on a Sunday evening, before the opening of the markets, it introduced a new era: that of a currency underpinned solely…
Hyman Minsky, the clairvoyant black sheep
November 25, 2021Deceased in 1996, Hyman Minsky was an economist who was barely known at all during his lifetime. Only certain enlightened minds – unorthodox ones, of course – were interested in his research which focused on the causes of financial crises. He owed his hour of glory to the subprime implosion in 2007 and it’s as…
Economics: an inexact science
November 13, 2021The raising of America’s debt ceiling has again been in the headlines these last few weeks. It was in 1917 that this practice began in the US, not to put the brakes on public spending as many believe, but to give flexibility to the executive branch during its participation in the First World War.…
China trapped by capitalism
October 28, 2021China has thus far functioned by building 15 million homes a year, which is 5 times more than the US and Europe combined. After the collapse of the 300 billion dollar Evergrande, the biggest real estate company in China, the issue – albeit not a recent one – of the country’s ghost towns has…
Colonizing by Lending
October 14, 2021Colonisation is no longer what it once was. Actually, it just doesn’t use the same means anymore. Nowadays, to colonise, you lend, and that’s how you enslave. Over history, the debtor’s inability to pay has been used as an excuse to engage armies, like the British invasion of Egypt in 1882 because the country…
The Chinese Imperium against Honor of Kings
October 1, 2021There are 100 million young Chinese people playing Honor of Kings every day, the most popular and profitable online video game in the world that rakes in 7 billion dollars a year for its developers. Basically under the thumb of the virtual world, Chinese civil society is beginning to cause great headaches for its leaders…
China infected by financial capitalism
September 20, 2021The weight of the real estate industry has now become significant in the Chinese economy. Whereas it made up 5% of GDP in 1995, it is now one of the country’s main growth drivers, coming to more than 30% of economic activity. It is more or less at the same level as the real…
China at war with spiritual opium!
September 14, 2021China has declared war. Against its own technology companies. Since last February, the capitalisations of jewels such as Tencent, Alibaba, Kuaishou Technology and Meituan have lost billions of dollars. The stock index Hang Seng Tech that figures the biggest technology companies in the country has collapsed by 45%. The big business leaders have been…
The sacking of Haiti by France
September 1, 2021The Haitian Revolution was, without doubt, one of the most interesting and epic events of modern history. Taking place from 1791 to 1804, this moment was indeed fundamental for the country itself, but also had global repercussions that are still being reviewed today. First of all, the Haitian Revolution led to the creation of…
The Taliban’s money
August 23, 2021For 20 years, the Taliban’s immense fortune has ravaged Afghanistan and spread death and destruction there. They are complex, the Taliban’s finances, not at all monolithic but structurally edified on a vast criminal and mafioso network operated around the Haqqani network. Their revenue is made up of taxes levied on their subjects, the trafficking…
Japan, mirror of the world
June 29, 2021Japan is the world’s laboratory. It’s in this country that in 2001, for the very first time, the famous quantitative easing measures were put in place that tried to break the believed-to-be impenetrable barrier of zero interest rates that had been set in 1999. It was a revolutionary endeavour for the time, led by…
Why nations prosper
June 19, 2021Demographics are an indicator of the long-term destiny of a nation, and at the same time demonstrate the current mood of its citizens. Having abolished the only-child regime in 2016 to encourage families to have a second, China now even implicitly tolerates a third child across certain regions in need of population growth.…
These Germans insulting Keynes and the citizens of Europe
June 8, 2021On June 2nd Wolfgang Schäuble, President of the German Bundestag and former Minister of Finance of the country decided to pen a piece for the Financial Times where he invokes multiple times the spirit of the great Keynes, quoting him on no less than six occasions!
Putin’s choice?
June 2, 2021It is reluctantly that the West is setting out measures to punish Lukashenko’s Belarus for his recent misdeeds. The current regime in Minsk, being in survival mode, obviously hadn’t foreseen such an international backlash, since it has been wholly preoccupied, obsessed even, with trying to neutralise its adversaries. It is also true that Lukashenko…
Politics and finance: an incestuous relationship
May 27, 2021There was once a time when what was good for General Motors was as a matter of course good for the USA. Nowadays, what’s good for Wall Street is good for the USA, a country that now lives under the influence of a financial oligarchy. The powerful myth of the US as a “nation…
Inspirational America
May 10, 2021The success is total. The solidarity exemplary. The determination unfailing. And that’s not even counting the phenomenal success of the USA’s vaccination campaign: I myself got vaccinated in March well before my age bracket was called and just two days after I signed up for it. The US government has achieved another great feat…
China vs. USA: the lethal weapon
May 3, 2021The Chinese are convinced that the United States are a declining power, and they are basing – as a consequence – all their actions on this prediction. This is why China now feels that it is strong enough to take on a hitherto impregnable and unchallenged stronghold, that being America’s currency and the exorbitant…
Robert Mundell, father of Europe?
April 14, 2021Well before the creation of the euro, the Canadian Robert Mundell who died a few days ago, laid out the conditions for success of a monetary union. His works won him the Nobel Prize for economics in 1999, the year that the euro launched. According to Mundell, a currency shared by a geographical region…
Germany’s grave historical manipulations
April 8, 2021Proof that the economy is also – and maybe first and foremost – political, German economists are now trying to rewrite history. There are some big names attempting to fiddle with the historical facts, adjusting them to fit their theories, or rather their fears. These ordoliberals, bordering on the fanatical, are warning against hyperinflation…
Should we be scared of the government?
March 29, 2021Government always caused fear and those who we now call “libertarians” always viewed public powers gaining momentum with unease since the expansion of a government’s remit has been interpreted by many citizens across the Western world as a rolling back of their own freedoms. For those who subscribe to this somewhat – to call it…