Brown’s “big” proposal to tax financial transactions – the so called Tobin tax – has been met with opposition by almost all the finance ministers of the G20. The reason is obvious; it actively discourages the trading of financial assets. It is this trading in 2009 of assets on the back of a new financial [...]
The recent meeting of the G20 leaders in Pittsburgh has seen the USA radically restructure the management of global capitalism’s finance and economic systems. The G20 came in to existence in the late 1990’s as a response to the first globalised financial crisis – the Asian crisis.
While the world economy has been globalised for decades [...]
In an incredible admission that a wave of countries from the periphery of the European Union to emerging markets to Eastern Europe to major countries such as the UK, the G20 has quadrupled the size of the International Monetary Fund to an incredible $1 trillion.
This fund will be used to bail out bankrupt countries and [...]
What a week it has been for the global financial and economic system. Capitalism’s latest crisis which has been running since August 2007 is rapidly tuning into a global whirlwind that is on the brink of becoming its’ second great depression.
Europe
At the end of last week several Russian banks indicated they would have difficulty in [...]
The sovereign wealth funds have lost a few hundred billion from the money they put into banks over the last 8 months. Banks are just eating capital up to cover writing off loans and losses on derivatives.
Darling is about to set up £200bn fund to prop up the banks again.
The falling oil price is hitting [...]
The 1.5% cut in base rates has confirmed what we have been saying since January of this year: the UK is entering its most severe economic recession since the 1930s. Even the most optimistic economists are predicting that the UK will be in recession for the whole of 2009 – that is negative growth in [...]
That is the question all serious economists are asking but the financial markets are ignoring. A raft of data confirms that the US economy has gone into decline in the third quarter of 2008 with the largest fall in consumer confidence and spending in the same quarter since records began to be collected in 1947. [...]
