Financial News

The motives and thinking behind Brexit were even less worthy than those behind US President Richard Nixon’s move in 1971 to ditch the Bretton Woods system. But, as with the “Nixon shock,” there is a singular underlying historical factor that explains Brexit.

ATHENS – At pivotal historical moments, rational political ruptures often are brought about for all the wrong reasons. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Brexit may prove to be a case in point,

Anti-capitalists had a miserable year. But so did capitalism.

While the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party in the UK this month threatened the radical left’s momentum, particularly in the US, where the presidential primaries loom, capitalism found itself under fire from some unexpected quarters.

When the Great Depression followed the 1929 stock-market crash, almost everyone acknowledged that capitalism was unstable, unreliable, and prone to stagnation.
In the decades that followed, however, that perception changed. Capitalism’s post-war revival, and especially the post-Cold War rush to financialised globalisation, resurrected faith in markets’ self-regulating abilities.