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"Speculators may do no harm," John Maynard Keynes once hypothesized, "as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation." Which is precisely what had happened by 2007: Atop the tsunami of European and Asian profits rushing into Wall Street, bankers built oversized bubbles of exotic forms of private debt that, at some point, acquired the properties of private money. In their mindsCrony capitalismTrue, the capital bubble did nothing for wagestotal financial movements across the globe are less than a fourth of what they were in early 2007. Wal-Mart, whose ideology of cheapness symbolized the devaluation of labour and the gutting of traditional local businesses, is itself being squeezed by the Amazon model, whose ultimate effect is a further shrinking of overall spending. And the walls that were the nasty underbelly of the "global village" are now a source of political discontent, exposing the absurdity of a system that promotes the free movement of money and trucks while people remain fenced in. Over-simplification
Looking at the world from an Archimedean distance, globalization has been caught in a steel trap of its own making. Its crisis is due to too much money in the wrong hands. Humanity's accumulated savings per capita are at the highest level in history. All in the hands of people who can't actually spend it. However, our investment levels (especially in the things humanity needs, such as green energy) are particularly low. In the United States, massive sums are accumulating in the accounts of companies and people with no use for them, while those without prospects or good jobs are immersed in mountains of debt.
In China, savings approaching half of all income sit side by side with the largest credit bubble imaginable. Europe is even worse: There are countries with gigantic trade surpluses but nowhere to invest them domestically (Germany and the Netherlands), countries with deficits and no capacity to invest in badly needed labour and capital (Italy, Spain, Greece) and a euro zone unable to mediate between the two types of countries because it lacks the federal-like institutions that could do this.
Won't work
And if these discontents were not enough, there is also the rise of the machines. By 2020, almost half the professions in Europe and North America will be susceptible to automation. Robots require a few highly paid designers and operators but may replace millions. This generates labour shortages and labour gluts in the same city at the same time. The middle class is in for another hollowing out, wage inequality is about to rise again in the richer countries, while developing countries will soon realize that having large young populations offers no respite from poverty: With robots getting smarter and cheaper, deglobalization takes over, and countries such as Nigeria, the Philippines and South Africa will bear the brunt of relocalization (especially with the evolution of 3-D printing).
Is it any wonder that parochialism, nativism and xenophobia are rearing their ugly heads everywhere? Rather than focusing on the role of Facebook, Russia or some unexplained, newfangled fear of the "foreigner," the so-called liberal establishment (which is neither liberal nor particularly well-established, judging by recent electoral results in Europe and the United States) should look instead at globalization's rotting foundations, which render it unsustainable.
But if globalization is no longer viable, what's next? The answer offered by the so-called alt-right, the xenophobes and those who invest in militant parochialism is clear: Return to the bosom of the nation-state, surround yourselves with electrified fences and cut deals between the newly walled realms on the basis of national interest and relative brute strength. The fact that this nightmare is presented as a dream is yet another failure of globalization: Mr. Trump is a symptom of Barack Obama's failure to live up to the expectations he had cultivated among the victims of globalization and its 2008 spasm.
Lest we forget, our problems are global. Like climate change, they demand local action but also a level of international co-operation not seen since Bretton Woods. Neither North America nor Europe nor China can solve them in isolation or even via trade deals. Nothing short of a new Bretton Woods system can deal with tax injustice, the dearth of good jobs, wage stagnation, public and personal debt, low investment in things we desperately need, too much spending on things that are bad for us, increasing depravity in a world awash with cash, robots that are marginalizing an increasing section of our work forces, prohibitively expensive education that the many need to compete with the robots, etc.
Robots work for free,,, you don't compete with them.First, we need higher wages everywhere, supported by trade agreements and conditions that prevent the Uberization of waged labour domestically. Not going to happen
Tax havens are crying out for international harmonization, including a simple commitment to deny companies registered in offshore tax havens legal protection of their property rights.
We desperately need a green-energy union focusing on common environmental standards, with the active support of public investment and central banks.
We should create a New Bretton Woods system that recalibrates our financial infrastructure, with one umbrella digital currency in which all trade is denominated in a manner that curtails destabilizing trade surpluses and deficits.
A one-world digital currency is a "bridge to far". There are just TOO MANY hackers. There are just too many States that would demand to have control over issuance. gold will be drug in out of the shadows once again. Trade surpluses are created by HARD WORK. The Greeks and Italians have never had trade surpluses. As long as we consider all people to be equal, there can never be one financial system for all.
And we need a universal basic dividend that would be administered by the New Bretton Woods institutions and funded by a percentage of big tech shares deposited in a world wealth fund.
UBI would motivate too many people to stop working. It would ruin most people.
The financial genie needs to be put back in its bottle, with capital controls domestically and globally to be imposed by co-ordinated action in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Money must be democratized and internationally managed in a manner that shrinks both trade deficits and surpluses. The robots must become humanity's slaves, a feat that requires common ownership, at least partly. Yanis is brilliant but, he has too little understanding of human nature.
All this sounds utopian. But no more so than the idea that the globalization of the 1990s can be maintained in the 21st century or replaced profitably for the majority by a revived nationalism.
Who should pursue this internationalist agenda? Progressives from Europe and North America have a duty to start the ball rolling, courtesy of our collective failure to civilize capitalism. Capitalism was civilized as long as there was a limit maintained on money creation. I have no doubt that if we embark upon this path, others in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa will soon join us. At DiEM25, the Democracy in Europe Movement that I proudly co-founded, we take this duty seriously. We are determined to take this agenda, which we refer to as the European New Deal, to voters across the continent in the May, 2019, European Parliament elections. With globalization in retreat and militant parochialism on the rise, we have a moral and political duty to do so.
The great powers are re-arming and talking about war. There is going to have to be a LOT of death before they will talk about cooperation
"Speculators may do no harm," John Maynard Keynes once hypothesized, "as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation." Which is precisely what had happened by 2007: Atop the tsunami of European and Asian profits rushing into Wall Street, bankers built oversized bubbles of exotic forms of private debt that, at some point, acquired the properties of private money. In their mindsCrony capitalismTrue, the capital bubble did nothing for wagestotal financial movements across the globe are less than a fourth of what they were in early 2007. Wal-Mart, whose ideology of cheapness symbolized the devaluation of labour and the gutting of traditional local businesses, is itself being squeezed by the Amazon model, whose ultimate effect is a further shrinking of overall spending. And the walls that were the nasty underbelly of the "global village" are now a source of political discontent, exposing the absurdity of a system that promotes the free movement of money and trucks while people remain fenced in. Over-simplification
Looking at the world from an Archimedean distance, globalization has been caught in a steel trap of its own making. Its crisis is due to too much money in the wrong hands. Humanity's accumulated savings per capita are at the highest level in history. All in the hands of people who can't actually spend it. However, our investment levels (especially in the things humanity needs, such as green energy) are particularly low. In the United States, massive sums are accumulating in the accounts of companies and people with no use for them, while those without prospects or good jobs are immersed in mountains of debt.
In China, savings approaching half of all income sit side by side with the largest credit bubble imaginable. Europe is even worse: There are countries with gigantic trade surpluses but nowhere to invest them domestically (Germany and the Netherlands), countries with deficits and no capacity to invest in badly needed labour and capital (Italy, Spain, Greece) and a euro zone unable to mediate between the two types of countries because it lacks the federal-like institutions that could do this.
Won't work
And if these discontents were not enough, there is also the rise of the machines. By 2020, almost half the professions in Europe and North America will be susceptible to automation. Robots require a few highly paid designers and operators but may replace millions. This generates labour shortages and labour gluts in the same city at the same time. The middle class is in for another hollowing out, wage inequality is about to rise again in the richer countries, while developing countries will soon realize that having large young populations offers no respite from poverty: With robots getting smarter and cheaper, deglobalization takes over, and countries such as Nigeria, the Philippines and South Africa will bear the brunt of relocalization (especially with the evolution of 3-D printing).
Is it any wonder that parochialism, nativism and xenophobia are rearing their ugly heads everywhere? Rather than focusing on the role of Facebook, Russia or some unexplained, newfangled fear of the "foreigner," the so-called liberal establishment (which is neither liberal nor particularly well-established, judging by recent electoral results in Europe and the United States) should look instead at globalization's rotting foundations, which render it unsustainable.
But if globalization is no longer viable, what's next? The answer offered by the so-called alt-right, the xenophobes and those who invest in militant parochialism is clear: Return to the bosom of the nation-state, surround yourselves with electrified fences and cut deals between the newly walled realms on the basis of national interest and relative brute strength. The fact that this nightmare is presented as a dream is yet another failure of globalization: Mr. Trump is a symptom of Barack Obama's failure to live up to the expectations he had cultivated among the victims of globalization and its 2008 spasm.
Lest we forget, our problems are global. Like climate change, they demand local action but also a level of international co-operation not seen since Bretton Woods. Neither North America nor Europe nor China can solve them in isolation or even via trade deals. Nothing short of a new Bretton Woods system can deal with tax injustice, the dearth of good jobs, wage stagnation, public and personal debt, low investment in things we desperately need, too much spending on things that are bad for us, increasing depravity in a world awash with cash, robots that are marginalizing an increasing section of our work forces, prohibitively expensive education that the many need to compete with the robots, etc.
Robots work for free,,, you don't compete with them.First, we need higher wages everywhere, supported by trade agreements and conditions that prevent the Uberization of waged labour domestically. Not going to happen
Tax havens are crying out for international harmonization, including a simple commitment to deny companies registered in offshore tax havens legal protection of their property rights.
We desperately need a green-energy union focusing on common environmental standards, with the active support of public investment and central banks.
We should create a New Bretton Woods system that recalibrates our financial infrastructure, with one umbrella digital currency in which all trade is denominated in a manner that curtails destabilizing trade surpluses and deficits.
A one-world digital currency is a "bridge to far". There are just TOO MANY hackers. There are just too many States that would demand to have control over issuance. gold will be drug in out of the shadows once again. Trade surpluses are created by HARD WORK. The Greeks and Italians have never had trade surpluses. As long as we consider all people to be equal, there can never be one financial system for all.
And we need a universal basic dividend that would be administered by the New Bretton Woods institutions and funded by a percentage of big tech shares deposited in a world wealth fund.
UBI would motivate too many people to stop working. It would ruin most people.
The financial genie needs to be put back in its bottle, with capital controls domestically and globally to be imposed by co-ordinated action in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Money must be democratized and internationally managed in a manner that shrinks both trade deficits and surpluses. The robots must become humanity's slaves, a feat that requires common ownership, at least partly. Yanis is brilliant but, he has too little understanding of human nature.
All this sounds utopian. But no more so than the idea that the globalization of the 1990s can be maintained in the 21st century or replaced profitably for the majority by a revived nationalism.
Who should pursue this internationalist agenda? Progressives from Europe and North America have a duty to start the ball rolling, courtesy of our collective failure to civilize capitalism. Capitalism was civilized as long as there was a limit maintained on money creation. I have no doubt that if we embark upon this path, others in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa will soon join us. At DiEM25, the Democracy in Europe Movement that I proudly co-founded, we take this duty seriously. We are determined to take this agenda, which we refer to as the European New Deal, to voters across the continent in the May, 2019, European Parliament elections. With globalization in retreat and militant parochialism on the rise, we have a moral and political duty to do so.
The great powers are re-arming and talking about war. There is going to have to be a LOT of death before they will talk about cooperation
The CBs are absolutely mystified as to why their policies are not working. ALL the markets are going up. 
The research is out there that definitively proves that ALL their precious models are garbage. The oil companies could easily assemble the research and blow the "anthropogenic" people out of the water. The U.N. has come out and revealed that global warming is a scam to shift money from rich (not really) countries to poor countries.
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