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…
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…
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…
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…
Bitcoin and the conspiracy theorists
March 17, 2021Those frothing at the mouth over this “monetary revolution” take refuge in mistrusting their government, or in lacking confidence in their currency that they think won’t be worth much the next day due to the actions of the central banks. Or it’s for both reasons, that alas have got a bit confounded in the…
You are all Charles Ponzi!
October 27, 2020“Give Ponzi a million”, the Wall Street Journal declared in an article on 2nd August 1920, “and in a twelve month he will expand it for you to some $25,000,000; in two years to $657,000,000; in three years to $16,885,000,000. Surely the Allies could spare him a million, and within three years clean up…
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…
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…
Would the West accept being saved by Islamic finance?
January 19, 2019The Nobel prize winner for economics, Eugene Fama, born in 1939 and one of the fathers of monetarism and the neoliberal ideology, is known for having pre-emptively asserted that “the idea of efficient markets is a simple assertion that states that the prices of securities and assets reflect all the information known”. It is in…