banking crisis

  [Beginning this week, ‘Parapolitics’ will be a fortnightly column appearing on the second and fourth Thursday of every month.] We were never so helpless, never so bereft, never more in need of a platform of struggle. The need for a new political formation is acutely felt today as never before. And by a new … Continue reading The Need for a New Political Platform →

When the World Health Organization announced on February 24th that it was time to prepare for a global pandemic, the stock market plummeted. Over the following week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by more than 3,500 points or over 10%. In an attempt to contain the damage, on March 3rd the Federal Reserve slashed […]

The European Union Court today delivered its verdict: European citizens cannot be allowed to find out whether the ECB acted legally in closing down Greece’s banks in June 2015. Why? In the wording of the three judges, because such disclosure would affect the ECB’s “space to think in 2015 and also after 2015”. If this sounds like an Orwellian decision, it is because it is an Orwellian decision.

Every so often humanity manages genuinely to surprise itself. Events to which we had previously assigned zero probability push us into what the ancient Greeks referred to as aporia: a state of intense bafflement urgently demanding a new model of the world we live in. The Crash of 2008 was such a moment. Suddenly, the world ceased to make sense in terms of what, a few weeks before, passed as conventional wisdom – even McDonald’s, for goodness’ sake, could not secure an overdraft from Bank of America!

As you grow up and experience more of the ups and downs of the economy, you will notice a piece of mindbending hypocrisy: during the good times, bankers, entrepreneurs—rich people in general—tend to be against government.

To watch the video click on the photo above or click  here.

In this BBC World at One program dedicated to the Crash of 2007-8, I try, in the space of two and a half minutes, to explain why those momentous events, ten years ago, changed the world in a manner that it no longer makes sense in terms common prior to 2007. Of why I claim that 2007/8 was to capitalism what 1991 was to socialism

 
Join the campaign to demand that the ECB publish the legal opinion it commissioned on whether its closure of Greece’s banks in 2015 was… legal. CLICK HERE!

To mark its first anniversary DiEM25 has today published a summary of its White Paper entitled ‘European New Deal: An economic agenda for European Recovery’. The full White Paper will be launched on the 25th March 2017 in Rome, in the context … Continue reading →