debt

Jorge González Morales (Mexico), Capitalism, 2020
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Simply “printing” more money and adding more debt to the existing enormous debt load in the U.S. is not a solution. It is particularly irresponsible when it is done with no connection to social production and the working class. Non-fictitious value comes only from the labor-time of workers involved in the process of producing goods and services. Value cannot come from thin air. Capital does not magically produce value by itself.

US: A study released by the University of Chicago reports that 33-million jobs have been lost since the lockdown, and more than 40% of them are gone forever. 14-million Americans will be unemployed.

Great Depression
Since the 2008 economic collapse engineered by Wall Street, most of the world’s economies have been running on gas fumes and more bankrupt schemes and failed policies. Few, if any, economies have been able to return to weak pre-2008 economic growth levels. Even the Chinese and Indian economic “miracles” are not that miraculous.

I admit upfront that this is a hard newsletter to read. It is about debt. There is a bloodless quality to the way that we talk about the debt of the poorer nations. There is nothing poetic here. The numbers are alienating, their outcome shocking.

Ha Manh Thang, Not Memory no. 1, 2009.

There is surprisingly a certain degree of optimism around at the moment, despite virtually entire populations and economies on lockdown. Although things are really bad for millions right now due to the effects of lockdown, economist Mariana Mazzucato believes that the Covid-19 crisis will shine light on societal and economic systems all across the world, exposing some of the deep-rooted flaws of capitalism.

Did Congress just nationalize the Fed? No. But the door to that result has been cracked open.

In what is being called the worst financial crisis since 1929, the US stock market has lost a third of its value in the space of a month, wiping out all of its gains of the last three years. When the Federal Reserve tried to ride to the rescue, it only succeeded in making matters worse. The government then pulled out all the stops. To our staunchly capitalist leaders, socialism is suddenly looking good.