Posts Tagged ‘ Financial Crisis ’

Stop the neo-​liberal crisis politics – dispossess the beneficiaries!

By
2
11 May 2012
Europa Kaputt

New inter­na­tional call to Blockupy from attac aca­demic advisors and others. Repos­ted from www​.stop​-neo​lib​eral​-crises​-polit​ics​.org (in DE, FR, IT, ES there): We are exper­i­en­cing the deep­est crisis of cap­it­al­ism since the great depres­sion of the 30s – and the European gov­ern­ments con­tinue to pour oil on the fires! From the very begin­ning, some gov­ern­ments have pre­ven­ted a solidarity-​based solu­tion to the crisis in Europe and are sig­ni­fic­antly respons­ible for its exacer­ba­tion. This refers par­tic­u­larly to the Ger­man gov­ern­ment, which, in August 2008, blocked a sub­stan­tial eco­nomic stim­u­lus pack­age for Europe. Hardly had the reces­sion reached its low­est point in Ger­many in 2009, when the Ger­man gov­ern­ment preached the neces­sity for hard aus­ter­ity policies. The “debt brake” was anchored in the con­sti­tu­tion: polit­ics dis­em­powered itself, shaped ...
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What follows farce?

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0
28 March 2012
george-osborne-bullingdon

At this week’s UK Treas­ury Select Com­mit­tee hear­ing on the Budget of 2012, attendees were invited to draw par­al­lels between George Osborne’s view of eco­nom­ics and the mil­it­ary stratagems of Field Mar­shall Haig. It seems that the Brit­ish Chan­cel­lor of the Exchequer has fol­lowed Haig in believ­ing that the best way to con­found one’s enemies is to do what any rational being would least expect: to make the same mis­take again and again, stub­bornly and without recourse to compassion. The moment of par­tic­u­larly acute pinch­ing of one’s nasal bridge came when Osborne set forth his ideas for boost­ing lend­ing to small busi­nesses; a mat­ter on which his much trum­peted Pro­ject Mer­lin has miser­ably failed its aims. Osborne’s ingeni­ous solu­tion was ...
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The Muppet Show

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0
15 March 2012
A Goldman Sachs client (apparently)

Greg Smith's resignation letter in the New York Times yesterday, announcing a bridge-burning departure from his position as Executive Director of Goldman Sachs' Equity Derivatives Division (Europe, Asia, Africa) certainly brought Wall St. to a relative halt. GS cancelled conference calls and the Goldman Flacks (PR goons) were rounded up to pour scorn on Mr. Smiths allegations as "unrecognisable". The importance of the letter was not so much it's revelation of a eat-what-you-kill culture in which clients are the main course, not even the contention that somehow GS had changed culture - it hadn't any more than any other investment bank since the Big Bang. The letter was important because it effectively took GS clients' faces and slammed them against ...
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Fiscal Crisis or the Neo-​liberal Assault on Democracy

By
3
14 November 2011
Making Money – Andy Warhol

Of course, it is always pos­sible, and very often the case, that the dom­in­ant media claims that a “fiscal crisis” has pre­cip­it­ated mass demon­stra­tions, strikes, and new forms of polit­ical mobil­iz­a­tion in Greece. Although it is true that there is fiscal crisis, it should not be under­stood as a peri­odic dif­fi­culty that a coun­try or a region peri­od­ic­ally passes through only then to re-​enjoy the eco­nomic status quo. What is emer­ging in fast and furi­ous form is a con­stel­la­tion of neo-​liberal eco­nomic prac­tices that are estab­lish­ing a new paradigm for think­ing about the rela­tion between eco­nomic and social forms as well as modes of ration­al­ity, mor­al­ity, and sub­ject form­a­tion. And the prob­lem, that which pushes tens of thou­sands of people onto the street, is ...
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GFC2?

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0
5 August 2011
Devouring Self

The inev­it­ab­il­ity with which global mar­kets would fall off their to-​date unreal­istic levels did noth­ing to mol­lify the depth and panic of the spasms. It has become a tru­ism that noth­ing in the struc­ture of inter­na­tional fin­ance has changed, save that the losses of private banks had been social­ised, lead­ing to the great weight of legal activ­ity fall­ing on the side of the gen­eral pop­u­lous who have been sub­jec­ted to vicious cuts. The bad debts had not gone away, the global trade imbal­ances remained set against US dom­in­a­tion, the com­plex products con­tin­ued to be pack­aged and issued under new titles, the reg­u­lat­ory con­trol remained min­imal, if not laugh­able. As such, it has been quite appar­ent to all but gov­ern­ments that ...
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A Short Legal History of the Credit Crunch — Part 4 of 4

By
1
17 February 2011
Luzern totentanz Ritterscherpalast

The suf­fer­ing spreads Our notional executive’s assump­tion about how industry would help the banks and the eco­nomy out of the Credit Crunch was in one ele­ment cor­rect. Bor­row­ers had bailed out the banks, but it was only by means of work­ers’ redund­an­cies, the strip­ping of the products of their labour, and in not a few cases an enterprise’s utter destruction. The pub­li­cised sui­cides of vari­ous busi­ness­men, such as Adolf Mer­ckle and Kirk Steph­en­son1 barely indic­ated the suf­fer­ing that was passing through com­munity after com­munity as employ­ers fol­ded and asset prices col­lapsed. In the UK, for example, the num­ber of people com­mit­ting sui­cide rose by 329 to 5,706 in 2008 — the first increase since 1998. The rate of sui­cide among men went up from 16.8 ...
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A Short Legal History of the Credit Crunch — Part 2 of 4

By
1
15 February 2011
Quentin Metsys - The Moneylenders

With the Credit Crunch in the fin­ance sec­tor now caus­ing dele­ter­i­ous effects in the ‘real’ eco­nomy (see Part 1), con­cerned Fin­ance Dir­ect­ors (“FDs”) turned to their rela­tion­ship banks with a view to agree­ing how best to muddle through what appeared to be a tem­por­ary dip caused by a prob­lem in the arcane world of credit derivatives. Ini­tial con­ver­sa­tions between FD and bank revealed, how­ever, that the old story about nice bankers exist­ing solely to enable tal­en­ted people to build factor­ies for the bene­fit of the spe­cies, a story drummed into every FD from account­ing school, was utterly myth­ical. The banks’ bal­ance sheets were full of both holes and ‘toxic’ assets, and they needed to be repaired before any one of the banks went the ...
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A Short Legal History of the Credit Crunch — Part 1 of 4

By
2
14 February 2011
Quentin Metsys - The moneylenders

In this series of four art­icles this week I exam­ine the course of the Credit Crunch from the per­spect­ive of the inter­face between the hyper-​financialised world of col­lat­eral debt oblig­a­tions and secur­it­isa­tion, and the more famil­iar world of indus­trial cor­por­ate debt. It is at this nexus that many of the sub­sequent devel­op­ments in the world eco­nomy can be loc­ated. It also provides a use­ful start­ing point for dis­cuss­ing legal com­plex­ity, rather than the ‘ante­cedent but not prin­cipal cause’ of the crisis, namely the bust in the Res­id­en­tial Mortgage-​Backed Secur­it­ies mar­ket, whose struc­ture oper­ated as a cul­min­a­tion of legal and eco­nomic innov­a­tions in var­ied fields, includ­ing that of cor­por­ate debt finance. With the mar­ket in secur­it­ies flat-​lining in 2009 and asset prices head­ing down­hill, one ...
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