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…
If only we were all Japanese!
December 12, 2019The economists and bankers of my generation have had the habit of entertaining themselves by dividing the world into four types of economies: developed, emerging, Argentina and Japan. It is worth, however, updating this somewhat simplistic and caricatural joke by removing Japan from the list of economic aberrations. Albeit highly unlikely, the Japanese property…
The Gospel according to Saint Money
November 30, 2019It’s a history condemned to repeat itself forever because, since the dawn of time, the enrichment of some has basically always been to the detriment of others. Inequality has often been described by the upper class as an inevitable side effect, systemic almost, of the prosperity and innovation that is however meant to benefit…
Lebanon: a new race of leaders
November 20, 2019To understand the events in Lebanon that have taken place over the last month, it is vital to have an idea of the country’s debt structure. In other words: the analysis of Lebanon’s public and private debt allows us to better understand this socioeconomic crisis. In fact, Lebanon is renowned for distinguishing itself…
Work is a perished good
November 13, 2019Full time work for a fixed salary has only existed for around a hundred years, and still not for everyone, as women were deprived of it for a good while, including during the happy times of full employment in the second half of last century. Today, deregulation, outsourcing and automation are all synonymous with…
Negative rates: an economic curse?
November 6, 2019Companies that don’t pay interests on their debt are a like these students who never sit an exam: they somehow scrape by without any notable successes or accomplishments. The current level of rates should be encouraging investment because companies’ margins are much higher than the cost of capital, that is itself negligible. Even the…
Economists: can we trust them?
October 28, 2019Chile is the only Latin American country that is a member of the OECD, and not long ago it was still being cited as an example to follow because of its success and economic recovery. It is, however, just the latest victim to date of a neoliberalism whose ravages have now become universal. Chile’s fall…
Inflation of prices, deflation of policies
October 10, 2019So you think you understand inflation? Allow me to correct you because it is in no way the result of an unreasonable expansion of the money supply that translates into a rise in prices. This clichéd term of “inflation”, used unscrupulously by the detractors of central banks, by the prophets of misfortune whose commercial stock…