Your correspondent, explaining the roots of the debt crisis, at a teach-in as part of yesterday’s day of action against the cuts.
Part 2 - Bournemouth Uni Talk - The Attack On Education (via ZeroGov)
*I’d had four hours’ sleep, if that’s any help
**This is what my long-suffering students put up with every week
Posts tagged finance capital
Posted 1 year ago
Banks Are to Blame for Rising Food Costs
What’s behind the spiraling cost of food? It’s not just oil and the burgeoning appetites of Americans.
As Frederick Kaufman, the author of A Short History of the American Stomach explains in an article in this month’s Foreign Policy, titled “How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis”:
Since the bursting of the tech bubble in 2000, there has been a 50-fold increase in dollars invested in commodity index funds. To put the phenomenon in real terms: In 2003, the commodities futures market still totaled a sleepy $13 billion. But when the global financial crisis sent investors running scared in early 2008, and as dollars, pounds, and euros evaded investor confidence, commodities—including food—seemed like the last, best place for hedge, pension, and sovereign wealth funds to park their cash. “You had people who had no clue what commodities were all about suddenly buying commodities,” an analyst from the United States Department of Agriculture told me. In the first 55 days of 2008, speculators poured $55 billion into commodity markets, and by July, $318 billion was roiling the markets. Food inflation has remained steady since.
While rampant speculation by bankers in commodity index funds might sound lands away from your next meal, Kaufman writes in an earlier article for Harper’s (subscription req’d):
The worldwide price of food had risen by 80 percent between 2005 and 2008, and unlike other food catastrophes of the past half century or so, the United States was not insulated from this one, as 49 million Americans found themselves unable to put a full meal on the table. Across the country demand for food stamps reached an all-time high, and one in five kids came to depend on food kitchens. In Los Angeles nearly a million people went hungry.
And it’s inevitably going to get worse as the world reaches 10 billion. Time for bankers face the hard truth to their complicity.
Illustration: Tim Bower/Harper’s
Posted 1 year ago
Posted 1 year ago
As NAME ISSUE HERE has come to light, the Obama administration has resisted calls for a more forceful response, worried that added pressure might spook the banks and hobble the broader economy.
Posted 1 year ago
The corporate media, right-wing billionaires like the Wal-Mart family, Bill Gates and President Obama, are all in the same business. They are trying to create a private market in for-profit educational services that can be traded on the stock market and bet on derivatives but whose costs will be borne by the public. They project this public educational market to be potentially worth trillions of dollars – at virtually no risk to finance capital. That’s why the hedge funds are now so deep into charter schools. But, to transform the public schools into a privately-exploitable market requires great volumes of skillful propaganda, to convince the public that Wall Street and hedge funds will “save” public education. The movie “Waiting for Superman” is the latest, and slickest, of this corporate propaganda.
Posted 1 year ago
For a Public Utility Finance System
So what is the best way to tackle all these problems? The short answer is a public utility finance system, that is, financial institutions that are run in the public interest rather than as casinos and which are, in a variety of ways, publicly-owned. We should note that elements of a public utility finance system – as in China, Germany and parts of Scandinavia – have proved more compatible with industrial investment. On the other hand public stakes in the banking system are useless unless there is a determination to use them. The US and British authorities have huge majority holdings in giant ‘zombie banks’ like Citi Bank and RBS and yet they have refused to use their power to revivify these concerns and ensure that they make credit available to small and medium enterprises.
However if there was a willingness to foster investment-led growth where could the resources come from and where should they go to? The Group of 20 have been obliged to consider a banking levy and a financial transaction tax, something like the Tobin tax. There is obviously great scope for such levies and they would have the double benefit of restraining speculative activity and raising revenue. While there can be a place for rather modest levies on some types of transaction the banking levy should not be modest at all. Justice and strategy both demand very stiff measures, tantamount to the socialisation of a swathe of the financial institutions.
Posted 2 years ago
If we step back and look at the big game, we can see that hedge funds are hard at work skimming profits from the financial sector, which in turn is living off the largess of the American taxpayer. It’s all part of the great financialization of the U.S. economy that began in earnest when the financial sector was deregulated in the late 1970s. Over the years, financial sector profits have risen to nearly 40 percent of all corporate profits. And sadly, it’s not because financial firms helped our economy grow. It’s because they figured out how to run a very profitable casino for the wealthy. And then hedge funds came along and figured out how to skim the skim from those casinos.
This blog has been retired.
