Finance and the Economy

Claims Of Mass Workers Shortages And Layoffs; Read Between The Lines

February 3, 2023 Daniel Kostzer, Equal Times. Educate! Finance and the Economy, Inflation, Unemployment, Worker Rights and Jobs

In the midst of the economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, in trying to justify the acceleration in global inflation – even before the war in Ukraine – the mainstream media was flooded with news about the so-called ‘Great Resignation’, blaming an apparent shortage of workers for widespread bottlenecks in the production of goods. Today, the same media is talking about large-scale redundancies and layoffs by corporations. The explanations offered for this apparent trend could lead one to draw conclusions that barely scratch the surface in terms of understanding the true root causes of these issues. This impacts not just the general public but also, most worryingly, policymakers who could be led to implement poorly designed policies that produce negative effects on people, their livelihoods and the wider economy.

Fossil Fuel Groups ‘Spent Millions’ On Climate Disinformation During COP27

January 30, 2023 Phoebe Cooke, DeSmog. Educate! climate crisis, COP27, Disinformation, Finance and the Economy, Fossil Fuels, Media

Fossil fuel-linked groups spent around $4 million on Facebook and Instagram ads that spread false climate claims over the COP27 summit, a new report says. The physical presence of more than 600 fossil fuel lobbyists overshadowed the November conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, as world leaders, NGOs and activists gathered in a bid to accelerate global efforts to confront the climate crisis. Analysis out today shows oil and gas interests were also busy online. Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) – the coalition behind the second “Deny, Deceive, Delay” report – has documented how PR companies, front groups and oil majors were actively spreading disinformation in the weeks leading up to and during the summit. Researchers with the coalition’s COP27 Intelligence Unit identified over 3,700 ads sharing false claims on Facebook and Instagram, platforms owned by Meta.

What Causes Inflation?

January 29, 2023 Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson, Geopolitical Economy. Resistance Report Central Bank, Federal Reserve, Finance and the Economy, Inflation

Today’s discussion is focused on inflation and its much-debated return after many many decades. We thought we would structure our discussion around certain key questions. What is inflation? What is the textbook definition? How has it been understood in the past? What causes inflation? What are the supply and demand-side factors? Given that capitalism is considered such a powerful productive machine, why are the most powerful capitalist countries suffering from inflation today? What does it say about their productive system? What is, in fact, causing the current inflation? What is the Federal Reserve in the United States particularly — the most powerful central bank in the world — doing about it, and what’s wrong with what the Federal Reserve, and many other central banks, are doing? So Michael, why don’t you just start with your thoughts on the first question.

AZ Attorney General Created An Illegal Surveillance Program

January 28, 2023 Fikayo Walter-Johnson and Nathan Freed Wessler, American Civil Liberties Union. Educate! ACLU, Arizona, Finance and the Economy, Surveillance

Phoenix, Arizona - Last year, Sen. Ron Wyden raised alarms about one of the largest government surveillance programs in recent memory. Sen. Wyden revealed that the Arizona attorney general’s office, in collaboration with the Phoenix Field Office of the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations, had engaged in the indiscriminate collection of money transfer records for transactions exceeding $500 sent to or from Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas, as well as to or from Mexico. Any time anyone in the U.S. used companies like Western Union or MoneyGram to send or receive money to or from one of these states or Mexico — whether to send a remittance home, or help a relative with an emergency expense, or pay a bill — a record of their transaction was deposited into a database controlled by the Arizona attorney general and shared with other law enforcement agencies.

New Report On Extreme Wealth And Potential Wealth Tax Revenue

January 26, 2023 Chuck Collins, Inequality.org. Educate! Billionaires, Finance and the Economy, Tax the rich, Taxes

See our new report, researched and written by IPS, Oxfam, Patriotic Millionaires, and Fight Inequality Alliance. This report is a complement to Oxfam’s recently released, “Survival of the Richest.” Our report includes country-by-country data on wealth inequality and the revenue possibilities of national wealth taxes. The global billionaire class is gathering this week in Davos, Switzerland to talk about the ongoing “polycrisis” – a term embraced by the World Economic Forum (WEF) to describe the convergence of ecological, political, pandemic and economic disruptions. The one acute crisis they won’t talk about is the extreme levels of concentration of wealth and power happening across the globe. Estimates from our report, Extreme Wealth, demonstrate that $1.7 trillion could have been raised in 2022 alone if a progressive wealth tax were imposed on the ultra-rich. This revenue could be used to tackle global inequality and set in motion a system of economic democracy.

A Mobile Bank On Wheels Reaches Bronx Residents Where They Are

January 25, 2023 Emily Nonko, Next City. Create! Banking, Finance and the Economy, New York City (NYC), The Bronx

The Bronx, New York City, New York - At the height of the pandemic, bank after bank began shuttering across the Bronx — between 2019 and 2021, seven banks closed 17 branches, with more than half happening in 2020, according to The Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development. The closures exacerbated an existing problem: prior to COVID-19, the Bronx had the fewest bank branches and the most check cashers and pawnshops per household in the state, possibly the country. Community organizers in the Bronx had spoken out about the closures since 2019. But they weren’t making headway with the banks, who claimed they lost money on those branches, or banking regulators, as both state and federal agencies claimed they lacked enforcement power to stop the closures. So those same organizers found a solution to address the problem themselves: a mobile banking branch, free to travel the 42-square-mile borough.

Solving The Debt Crisis The American Way

January 19, 2023 Ellen Brown, Scheer Post. Create! Currency, Debt, Finance and the Economy, Inflation

On Friday, Jan. 13, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wrote to Congress that the U.S. government will hit its borrowing limit on Jan. 19, forcing the new Congress into negotiations over the debt limit much sooner than expected. She said she will use accounting maneuvers she called “extraordinary measures” to keep U.S. finances running for a few months, pushing the potential date for default to sometime in the summer. But she urged Congress to get to work on raising the debt ceiling. Lifting it above its current $31.385 trillion limit won’t be easy with a highly divided and gridlocked Congress. As former Republican politician David Stockman crowed in a Jan. 11 article: 15 [House] votes and the slings and arrows of MSM opprobrium were well worth it. That’s because the GOP’s anti-McCarthy insurrection obtained concessions which just might slow America’s headlong rush to fiscal armageddon. And just in the nick of time! We are referring, of course, to the Speaker elect’s promise that there will be no more debt ceiling increases without off-setting spending cuts; and that in the event of a double-cross a single Member of the House may table a motion to vacate the Speaker’s chair.

Oxfam Wants To More Than Double The Tax Rate On Our Richest

January 16, 2023 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Educate! Class Struggle, Finance and the Economy, Taxes, wealth inequality

Every January, the deep pockets of our world who see themselves as deep thinkers gather high up in the Alps to contemplate the world’s most pressing problems at the annual Davos World Economic Forum. Every January, analysts at Oxfam, the global group that champions economic justice, take this annual Davos moment to report out just how much our world’s richest contribute to those problems – and just how many of those problems they outright create. This year’s Oxfam Davos-time report, Survival of the Richest: How we must tax the super-rich now to fight inequality, adds to this pattern a fascinating new twist. Just what do we have to do, this Oxfam paper essentially asks, to keep our super-rich from being super? Central to Oxfam’s answer: a call for a tax rate “of at least 75 percent on all personal income” of those making over $5 million a year, basically those who sit in our world’s wealthiest 0.1 percent.

Inequality In Annual Earnings Worsens In 2021

January 2, 2023 Elise Gould and Jori Kandra, Economic Policy Institute. Educate! Class Struggle, Finance and the Economy, Wages, wealth inequality

Rising wage inequality and slow and uneven growth in real (inflation-adjusted) hourly wages for the vast majority of workers have been defining features of the U.S. labor market for most of the last 40 or so years. In only about 10 years since 1979 did most workers see any consistent positive wage growth: in the tight labor market of the late 1990s and in the five years leading up to the pre-pandemic labor market peak in 2019 (Gould 2020). Some low-wage workers have experienced disproportionate wage gains in the current business cycle—gains that even beat out high inflation (Gould and Kandra 2022). However, the latest data on annual earnings from the Social Security Administration (SSA 2022a) show that the very top continues to pull away and amass a larger share of the earnings pie, while the bottom 90% continues to fall further behind.

Russia Dropping US Dollar For Chinese Yuan – And Fast

December 27, 2022 Ben Norton, Multipolarista. Educate! China, De-dollarization, Finance and the Economy, Global Economy, Russia, Yuan

Russia has spent years trying to decrease its dependency on the US dollar. But especially since the escalation of the proxy war in Ukraine in 2022, Moscow has accelerated its drive toward de-dollarization. Western sanctions have locked Russia out of the US-dominated international financial architecture. Numerous Russian banks were disconnected from the SWIFT inter-bank messaging system. Washington and Brussels even froze a staggering $300 billion of the Russian central bank’s foreign exchange reserves. In response, Russia’s central bank has largely abandoned the US dollar and euro, and instead it plans to buy Chinese yuan on the currency market. In the span of less than a year, the yuan has quickly replaced the dollar as the most sought foreign currency in Moscow.

The Poor, Squeezed By 10 Trillion Dollars In External Debts

December 21, 2022 Baher Kamal, Inter Press Service News Agency. Educate! Class Struggle, Debt, Finance and the Economy, Poverty

The external debt of the world’s low and middle-income countries at the end of 2021 totalled 9 trillion US dollars, more than double the amount a decade ago. Such debt is expected to increase by an additional 1.1 trillion US dollars in 2023. Moreover, the debt-service payments, projected to top 62 billion US dollars in 2022, put the biggest squeeze on poor countries since 2000, according to the World Bank. As defined by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), debt service refers to payments in respect of both principal and interest. Actual debt service is the set of payments actually made to satisfy a debt obligation, including principal, interest, and any late payment fees. Scheduled debt service is the set of payments, including principal and interest, that is required to be made through the life of the debt, OECD goes on.

Media Prescribe More ‘Pain’ For Workers As Inflation’s Only Cure

December 20, 2022 Luca Goldmansour, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. Educate! Finance and the Economy, Inflation, Media, Worker Rights and Jobs

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is profit’s prophet and the corporate media are his cultish devotees, joining hands to sacrifice working people. In this cult, profit is sacrosanct. When inflation hits, this is because of the conditions upon which profits are made. It’s not the fault of profit-making itself. The problem is a “labor shortage,” or “too much demand,” which forces the invisible hand to raise prices—and not a shortage of dignified work, or a surplus of people living paycheck to paycheck. Maximal profits are a given, and scarcity for ordinary people is a requirement. This catechism means that, even if reporters in corporate media are sympathetic to working people’s struggle with the increasing costs of living, the group that inevitably needs to take a hit to curb inflation is, you guessed it, still working people.

What Does The Fed’s Jerome Powell Have Up His Sleeve?

December 7, 2022 Ellen Brown, Scheer Post. Educate! Federal Reserve, Finance and the Economy, Inflation

“There is no sense that inflation is coming down,” said Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell at a November 2 press conference, — this despite eight months of aggressive interest rate hikes and “quantitative tightening.” On November 30, the stock market rallied when he said smaller interest rate increases are likely ahead and could start in December. But rates will still be increased, not cut. “By any standard, inflation remains much too high,” Powell said. “We will stay the course until the job is done.” The Fed is doubling down on what appears to be a failed policy, driving the economy to the brink of recession without bringing prices down appreciably. Inflation results from “too much money chasing too few goods,” and the Fed has control over only the money – the “demand” side of the equation.

How Private Developers Profited From Tax Subsidies In Baltimore Intended To Revitalize Poor Neighborhoods

December 6, 2022 Mansa Musa, The Real News Network. Resistance Report Baltimore, Finance and the Economy, Maryland, Taxes

For 50 years, Baltimore city officials have trumpeted the use of tax subsidies for private developers as a way to catalyze economic development. As more and more public funds have gone into the pockets of the rich, the city’s prospects have only worsened. Hundreds of thousands of residents have left or been pushed out of the city, and numerous businesses have followed suit. In their new documentary, ‘Tax Broke,’ TRNN reporters Taya Graham and Stephen Janis team up with veteran Baltimore reporter Jayne Miller to tell the story of how capital has fed parasitically on taxpayer money for half a century. Stephen and Jayne join Rattling the Bars to share what their reporting in ‘Tax Broke’ uncovered.

The Fed’s Response To Inflation Is Another Upward Transfer Of Wealth

December 4, 2022 Chris Hedges, The Real News Network. Resistance Report Chris Hedges, Federal Reserve, Finance and the Economy, Inflation

The Federal Reserve has responded to runaway inflation by hiking up interest rates at the same time that Americans are drowning in historic levels of personal debt. With interest rates up, prices will only rise faster than wages, hitting the vast majority of people with stagnant or declining wages in real terms. The result is yet another upward transfer of wealth to the minority of capitalists responsible for the crisis in the first place. Economist Richard Wolff joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the origins of the inflation crisis, the Fed’s response, and what this all means for working people. Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School. He is the host of the weekly program Economic Update, and the author of several books, including his most recent title, The Sickness in the System: When Capitalism Fails To Save Us From Pandemics or Itself.

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