Real Estate Speculation vs. The Citizen
February 10, 2025The West faces a major challenge. We do not want our society to be divided into two classes: wealthy property owners and poor tenants.” These were the words recently spoken by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. Under his leadership, Spain will soon impose a 100% tax on any real estate purchased by non-resident nationals…
Substantial emptiness, radical tolerance
July 15, 2024This phrase from sociologist Ulrich Beck seems perfectly suited to what we are experiencing today. Extremes have become commonplace, even among those once considered reasonable, who now eagerly jump on the bandwagon of excesses. The “extreme center” itself has been extensively theorized. In a world where moderates are disappearing, democratic practice now systematically…
Abusive share buybacks
May 7, 2024In 10 years, Apple spent $ 625 billion buying back its own shares. This astronomical sum is equivalent to the market capitalization of the entire major Standard & Poor’s index, which includes 492 companies ! Financial engineering at its most dubious.
The Ravages of Economic Dogmatism
April 20, 2024They have brought Europe to a standstill. The productivity differential is widening further every quarter between us and the United States, who are racing ahead, far ahead of the European Union with their 2.6% growth compared to the pitiful European regression of 1.2%. Mario Draghi warned us a few months ago, stating that…
The Year 0 of Germany
March 20, 2024This is striking! The energy crisis of 2022 has been the worst economic crisis in Germany since WWII when looking at the decline of real wages. The increase in the price level is very likely permanent – those with savings have unexpectedly lost some of their purchasing power. The real estate owners (upper middle class)…
World : Life prognosis at stake
March 18, 2024It’s always the same eternal questions that torment us when a bubble bursts and wreaks havoc on human, economic, and ecological fronts: How did we get here? What happened? Our world finds itself today in a critical situation with few historical precedents because we are now all hostages to multiple and repetitive bubbles. There’s the…
The Age of Barbarians
March 15, 2024How can we forget the cult British series from the 60s, The Prisoner, where a terrifying bubble relentlessly pursued the hero played by the charismatic Patrick McGoohan? Our world finds itself in a similar situation because we are now all hostages to bubbles. From the bubble that isolates the rulers, to the bubble of the…
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…
Inequalities are an inevitability but the truth is a right
December 5, 2020More jobs will be lost. More businesses will go bust. More people will slip into precariousness. More children will go hungry. Let’s not kid ourselves about the exorbitant economic cost of the crisis to come. Also, the people must know what to prepare themselves for and they deserve clear explanations from their governments. They…
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…
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…
Has capitalism become obscene ?
September 20, 2018Wealth and income distribution have become grotesque in our Western nations. Collusion between political and economic powers has now become obvious, and it is of public notoriety that employment is nothing more than an adjustable variable in today’s capitalism. The tacit and consensual agreement on which our prosperity has been built thus far is crumbling…
1929, 1987, 2000, 2007 and 2018: haven’t we learned anything?
February 14, 2018Notwithstanding the drastic adjustment to the stock markets in the way of 10%, the world’s biggest economy, the one that’s always ahead of everyone else in growth and also depression, the one that serves as the ultimate example of neoliberalism – America – has made a spectacular recovery since the 2007-08 crisis. With its property…
Embracing globalisation, and curbing it
November 24, 2017The populist alternative is not the right one when it comes to calming the distressed middle classes of the West. In terms of responses and solutions, it would be much more gracious to restore their income and purchasing power. In fact, our middle classes have only benefited from the very fringes of globalisation, whereas it’s…
Hurricane Irma: welcome to a world of inequality
September 12, 2017The ravages of hurricane Irma are huge and barely imaginable, as islands like Antigua and Barbuda have been destroyed by more than 90%. Nowadays, alas, inequalities can take on multiple forms. Like poor allocation of resources, constantly depreciating income from work, precarious employment, the dismantling of the State leaving the poor with no protection, and…
How can rentiers be euthanised without massacring the middle class?
July 13, 2017Today, 500 million people live under the regime of negative rates. Is it the beginning of a new era where it will be commonplace for the yield on sovereign debts to be negative? In other words, where governments from the right, left and centre will finance their public debt at negative rates, and investors will…
Women’s rights: still far off from the final battle
July 4, 2017The work women carry out in the household is not remunerated or financially compensated. In fact, this mass of work provided by women in the home with their family is not even evaluated; it isn’t at all! As if they don’t formally get up and go to their places of work every morning, to do…
We are not all equal in the eyes of justice
January 21, 2017Might justice – or rather the deficiencies of justice – be about to destabilise the economic and financial system? Haven’t you noticed how the bosses of small businesses are ruthlessly pursued – sometimes to the point of harassment – while criminal justice scrambles to find legal justifications and motives when it has to deal with…
The year zero of Western depression
November 26, 2016Up to the present moment, peace, democratic values and even happiness have been intimately linked to economic growth. It is thus public notoriety that economic depression is the royal path that leads to war, or to extreme and extremist situations and stances in any case. Negative interest rates now seem to be one of the…
Uberising monetary creation
November 16, 2016How can we break free from the dominant ideology which asserts that States are only capable of budgetary discipline if they have to finance themselves via financial markets? Neoliberalism teaches us that market sanctions on lax nations will be exercised in the form of higher interest rates, meant to put spendthrifts back on the right…
Capitalism: soon to be a barbaric relic?
October 6, 2016“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 will…
Globalisation: R.I.P.
August 10, 2016Globalisation is dead: long live deglobalisation! While Brexit has (fortunately) not been the cataclysm that analysts had so predicted, it is nonetheless the most spectacular manifestation of the end of the reign of globalisation. A revolt against the elites has indeed been brewing – across Western countries – since the crises of the years 2007…
Capitalism: soon to be a barbaric relic?
June 6, 2016“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 will…
Something’s got to give
April 21, 2016The secular stagnation that is infecting our economies brings with it the germs of instability and financial torment. Since interest rates and monetary creation are the only weapons still at the disposal of the only public institutions that still wield some sort of power in our modern world, their initiation with a view to relaunching…
When real estate threatens growth
April 13, 2016It’s not a coincidence if real estate prices – relatively stable up until now – suffered unhealthy volatility at the dawn of the 1990s. This phenomenon was the direct consequence of integrating the banking and financial systems together because deregulation and innovations such as securitisation intensified the flow of cross-border and transcontinental capital, thus inducing…
Luxembourg: the worm in Europe’s apple
December 20, 2015It is the backbone of European tax evasion. A financial colony. One of the most fervent representatives of the money empire at the heart of Europe. It has been a systematic saboteur of the fight against tax fraud for several decades. Luxembourg is still the leading nation for secret banking benefits, a genuinely barbaric relic…
You don’t know it but you’re doing very well !
November 25, 2015The Venezuelan stock market has rocketed up by 200% this year and finds itself sitting atop global stock markets in terms of this exceptional performance. Is this to say that Venezuela is enjoying exceptional growth and that its positive repercussions are being felt by its people? Far from it in reality, since unemployment in Venezuela…
The pernicious effects of corporate bonuses
May 14, 2015The cash bonuses, stock options, pensions and mega salaries received by corporate executives are clearly a wealth transfer mechanism. In this regard, the Euro 300,000 annual pension to be paid to Philippe Varin, departing CEO of PSA Peugeot Citroën, pales in comparison to the remuneration of the great American bosses. Does Nicholas Woodman, GoPro founder,…