Turning the tables after the virus
March 23, 2020Thanks to this crisis, our duty is to rebuild society on a solid basis, as well as making deep reforms to financial markets and getting rid once and for all of their intrinsic ability to cause harm. Because, once again and in quite the same vein, the economic and financial crash that is unfolding…
The testament of a disillusioned economist
March 17, 2020This is my testament. My economic testimony. It’s been 12 years now that I’ve been analysing the crisis. All in all, I’ve been writing about the economy and finance for thirty years. However, it’s from 2007 that I’ve been trying tirelessly, through my books and my articles, to denounce what has come to be…
Oil: what a brutal world!
March 9, 2020We are living in turbulent times and our world can attest, since a few days ago, to the equivalent of a declaration of war taking place on the oil market. Saudi Arabia, that is suffering a fall of more than 20% of its exports to China (its biggest client) due to the coronavirus epidemic,…
We, the barbarians
March 2, 2020Economic science is up for the chop, and the profession has been put on the defensive. Those who imposed austerity during the last great crisis called on what they thought made up the fundamentals of the economy. The rare ones who rejected this stringency pleaded, for their part, for action in this discipline that…
The Saudi/US pact: reflection of a vulnerable America
February 17, 2020The US is made a distant comeback. Its dollar was, at the start of the 1970s, in a precarious situation due to the exorbitant cost of the Vietnam war and the various social programmes whose combined effects meant the country could no longer maintain the parity with gold that was established in 1944 at…
Keynes to the rescue for Lebanon
February 7, 2020When all is said and done, bankruptcy is nothing more than an accounting phenomenon, and growth is a matter of confidence. Otherwise, why would the Bank of Japan be the sole proprietor of half of its national bond market and why are its holdings in bonds and shares in the country reaching 100% of…
Brexit: the irreversible decline of a proud nation
January 31, 2020This 31st January 2020 will be known for a rolling back of freedoms, as Brexit tells above all the story of closure, a victory – not by KO but on points – for the partisans of a Great Britain that is revising its ambitions considerably downwards. Without it, the European Union will still count…
This Japan that won’t stop surprising us
January 24, 2020Japan has been able to face up to its destiny, and even to force it. It has handled perfectly one of the essential components of economic growth, that being demographics. In fact, the number of people on the payroll has increased there these last ten years, much more than in any other developed economy.…
Sanctions are testaments of American supremacy
January 14, 2020Contrary to popular belief, it’s not the weapon of the dollar that makes US sanctions against a country inescapable. The Greenback is of course the reserve currency par excellence on the global scale and naturally accounts for the American hegemony. However, doing business in another currency – for the many companies and nations under…
Germany is drowning in its ordoliberalism
December 31, 2019Do the Germans, who in their overwhelming majority are staunchly opposed to what they call the “Haftungsunion”, also known as transfer union implying that their country pays too much money into Europe, live in a parallel universe? Might the Germans have become populist in that they don’t hesitate to dig up a specious, fallacious, facile…