Crisis opening in 2007

Shaping up for the crisis

If you tell a man that he’s going to be hanged in the morning, then, as someone once said, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. The British National Party is expected to make serious electoral gains in a number of different elections over the coming period. It will most likely win more council seats. It may win a seat in the European Parliament. It may gain representation in Parliament in the next General Election, a year or so from now. It already has a seat in the London Assembly. The serious left needs to sound the political alarm bells. One of the main reasons why this is happening is the...

What's at stake in the fourth "Great Depression"?

We are probably in the first stages of the fourth international "great depression" in the history of capitalism. This is a longer version of this article than in the printed paper . The period between the early 1970s and the mid-1980s was never labelled a "great depression", but belongs with two other periods of economic disorder and recurrent recession: from the early 1870s to the mid 1890s, and from 1929 to World War 2. Some capitalist economic downturns have relatively little lasting social and political impact. Larger downturns are different. One trend among Marxist economists, the...

What “quantitative easing” means

The Bank of England’s move in early March to a new monetary tactic — “quantitative easing” — came alongside much economic-disaster news. The banks “bailed out” so lavishly last year still need more bailing out. Lloyds TSB, which was supposed to be a “strong” bank capable of saving HBOS by buying it out with Government aid, turns out to be as much a basket case as any other. In the USA, giants like Citigroup are in deep trouble, and conservative politicians talk about nationalisation. World trade has shrunk very rapidly: the Financial Times reported on 8 March that “countries with trade data...

“Bankers” occupy the DWP

Twenty-five activists dressed as bankers staged an occupation at the Department for Work and Pensions on Monday 9 March. Taking over the lobby of the Department for Work and Pensions’ Adelphi House they leafleted staff throughout the building. Carrying banners saying “Target the rich not the poor” and “Stop the Welfare Abolition Bill”, sat in front of the entry barriers and refused to leave. The aim of the protest was to highlight that fact the Welfare Reform Bill was designed by bankers, penalises the poor, and abolishes income support for single parents and incapacity benefit. The Bill which...

Lower inflation? Not in the supermarkets

Food prices are still rising at a rate of 10% per year, according to official figures reported in the Financial Times on 18 February. For months now, economists and the press have been predicting outright deflation - a fall in the average price level - for 2009. Prices of some staple industrial inputs - oil, gas, wheat, metals - have already gone down a lot, and the "70% off", "50% off", and "30% off" signs in shop windows do indicate some falling prices. Clothing and footwear prices, for example, went down 10% between January 2008 and January 2009. But day-to-day staples are still getting...

Has New Labour moved left?

Government economic policy has shifted drastically. But it is not a shift to the left. Today’s capitalism is, as the Financial Times writer Martin Wolf has put it, a machine for “privatising gains and socialising losses”. The change is that, in the crisis, the focus has shifted from the private gains (currently more meagre) to socialising big losses. A genuine left-wing response to the crisis requires a workers’ plan — a drive to mobilise the working class to take control of the huge accumulated gains of capitalist production, currently monopolised by the rich elite. • When Northern Rock first...

Marxist economists comment again on the crisis: 6. Costas Lapavitsas - The debacle of financialised capitalism

What sort of new shape of capitalism do you think might emerge from the shake-out of this crisis? For the rest of the series of interviews, click here First of all, we have to see how capitalism looked before the crisis. My own view, as I argued previously, is that capitalism has been financialised. Finance has penetrated every aspect of economic and social life, and turned towards extracting profit from individual income. It has also substituted itself for the public provision of various services, and now mediates them - housing, pensions, health, education... It has done a very bad job of it...

Crisis: the impact on women. The pressures and the fightback

Beyond boob jobs — how might the credit crunch affect women? is a recent article on The F-word (a feminist blog) by Carolyn Roberts. The writer makes an observation that I found true when researching this topic — that there is pretty much nothing written on the potential impact of the crisis on women. At the time of writing the London socialist feminist reading group on this topic came up first on an entire google search — great, but pretty depressing. Carolyn Roberts found three main articles: a story about an overweight woman who lost her job, started her own business and lost five stones...

£20 billion more "socialism for bosses and bankers" shows market breakdown

First, the Government semi-nationalised the banks. Now, it is quarter-nationalising the everyday process of trade credit, with the announcement on 14 January of Government guarantees for some £20 billion on loans made by banks to firms for "working capital", i.e. the cash they need to be able to pay wages and bills before their sales income comes in. This version of the article is longer than the one in the printed paper. The package announced by the Government is complicated. It wants to get the banks to lend by giving them some insurance against losses, but at the same time to keep some...

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