Washington Consensus

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pages: 226 words: 59,080

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Donald Davies, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, fudge factor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidity trap, loss aversion, low skilled workers, market design, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price elasticity of demand, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, white flight

But the term “Washington Consensus” fit the zeitgeist of the era only too well. Advocates of the Washington Consensus—whether in its original or expanded versions—presented it as good economics. For them, the policies reflected what sound economics teaches: Free markets and competition enable the efficient allocation of scarce resources. Government regulations, trade restrictions, and state ownership create waste and hamper economic growth. But this was an economics that did not go beyond Econ 101, as the advocates ought to have recognized. One problem was that the Washington Consensus skated over the deeper institutional underpinnings of a market economy, without which none of the market-oriented reforms could reliably deliver their intended benefits.

Andrews, “Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation,” New York Times, October 23, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/economy/24panel.html?_r=0. 9. John Williamson, “A Short History of the Washington Consensus” (paper commissioned by Fundación CIDOB for the conference “From the Washington Consensus towards a New Global Governance,” Barcelona, September 24–25, 2004). 10. Dani Rodrik, “Goodbye Washington Consensus, Hello Washington Confusion?: A Review of the World Bank’s Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reform,” Journal of Economic Literature 44, no. 4 (December 2006): 973–87. 11.

As the importance of institutions sank in, because of the poor response of many economies to Washington Consensus policies, reform efforts expanded in their direction. But it is one thing to slash import tariffs or remove ceilings on interest rates—two common enough approaches—and quite another to install, on short order, institutions that advanced economies acquired over decades, if not centuries. A useful reform agenda had to work with existing institutions, not engage in wishful thinking. Further still, the Washington Consensus presented a universal recipe. It presumed that all developing countries were pretty much alike—suffering from similar syndromes and in need of an undifferentiated list of reforms.


Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jones Act, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, microcredit, moral hazard, negative emissions, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, open borders, open economy, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, statistical model, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

It was during this period that Latin American economic policies changed dramatically, with most countries adopting Washington Consensus policies. As high inflation broke out in many of the countries, the Washington Consensus’s focus on fighting inflation made sense. Their governments had not been working well for them, and the appeal of the Washington Consensus—minimizing the role of government—was understandable. As countries like Argentina adopted the Washington Consensus policies, praise was heaped upon them. When price stability was restored and growth resumed, the World Bank and the IMF claimed credit for the success; the case for the Washington Consensus had been made. But, as it turned out, the growth was not sustainable.

By 2003, even the IMF had conceded that, at least for many developing countries, capital market liberalization had led not to more growth, just to more instability.13 Trade and capital market liberalization were two key components of a broader policy framework, known as the Washington Consensus—a consensus forged between the IMF (located on 19th Street), the World Bank (on 18th Street), and the U.S. Treasury (on 15th Street)—on what constituted the set of policies that would best promote development.14 It emphasized downscaling of government, deregulation, and rapid liberalization and privatization. By the early years of the millennium, confidence in the Washington Consensus was fraying, and a post–Washington Consensus consensus was emerging. The Washington Consensus had, for instance, paid too little attention to issues of equity, employment, and competition, to pacing and sequencing of reforms, or to how privatizations were conducted.

As officials there reflect on the lessons of that brutal experience, they have come to reject even more firmly the Washington Consensus market fundamentalism which opened their countries to the ravages of the speculators. And they have put more emphasis on equity and on policies to help the poor. Growth has recovered, but these students of the “class of’97” have not forgotten the lessons. Latin America East Asia demonstrated the success of a course markedly different from the Washington Consensus, with a role for government far larger than the minimalist role allowed by market fundamentalism. Meanwhile, Latin America embraced the Washington Consensus policies more wholeheartedly than any other region (indeed, the term was first coined with reference to policies advocated for that region).


Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States by Francis Fukuyama

Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business climate, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, crony capitalism, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, land reform, land tenure, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Burki and Perry, The Long March. 27. Burki and Perry, Beyond the Washington Consensus. 28. Ibid., p. 5. 29. Kuczynski and Williamson, After the Washington Consensus, p. 2. 30. Ibid., p. 308. 31. Ibid., p. 34. 32. Dani Rodrik, “After Neoliberalism, What?” remarks at the Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (BNDES) seminar on New Paths of Development, Rio de Janeiro, September 2003, quoted in Patricio Navia and Andres Velasco, “The Politics of Second-Generation Reforms,” in Kuczynski and Williamson, After the Washington Consensus, p. 269. 33. Ibid. 34. Terry Lynn Karl, “The Vicious Cycle of Inequality in Latin America,” in What Justice?

At the same time, the characteristics of that turning point appeared to dissipate any doubt as to the validity of the model of development that 42 The Historical Context had just received the most clamorous favorable verdict in world history. This helps to explain the enthusiasm with which most Latin American countries decided to resolve, once and for all, the age-old problem of endorsing the principles of the so-called Washington Consensus. As is well known, the neoliberal model prescribed by the Washington Consensus came significantly short of fulfilling its initial promises, but that did not preclude the later posing of the question of Latin America’s development gap in its original terms. More influential on this point was the fact that, once the Cold War was over and, with it, the contrast between capitalist development and the alternative proposed by socialism, the specific characteristics of different experiences within the framework of capitalism came to dominate the debate.

This became increasingly the case as the twentieth century peaked because of the challenge of competitiveness in the international marketplace. Asia competed and Latin America followed, but very slowly and with growing resistance toward the end of the century to the so-called liberal economic models embodied in the Washington Consensus.3 By the end of the 1990s, fierce resistance to the reform agenda had developed in many countries, leaving the Washington Consensus in tatters. The challenge in the twenty-first century is to undo or neutralize the errors and lapses in judgment of the old century. To do so will require a major reassessment of both the resources and the leadership required to close the gap with the United States and with developing Asia.


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The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa by Irene Yuan Sun

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset light, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business logic, capital controls, clean water, Computer Numeric Control, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, means of production, mobile money, Multi Fibre Arrangement, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tacit knowledge, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population

On the global level, it was clear by the mid-2000s that the Washington Consensus had failed. Even the coiner of the term admitted in 2002 that “[t]he results have been disappointing, to say the least, particularly in terms of growth, employment, and poverty reduction.”5 To make matters worse, the implementation of Washington Consensus policies contributed to growing inequality within countries and to increasingly frequent financial crises.6 Rodrik wrote in 2006, “Proponents and critics alike agree that the policies spawned by the Washington Consensus have not produced the desired results. The debate now is not over whether the Washington Consensus is dead or alive, but over what will replace it.”7 Over the past decade, the monolithic orthodoxy of the Washington Consensus has splintered into several camps that, while not directly contradicting one another, emphasize differing ingredients as being critical to success in development.

Dani Rodrik, “Goodbye Washington Consensus, Hello Washington Confusion? A Review of the World Bank’s Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reform,” Journal of Economic Literature 44 (December 2006): 973–987. The classic formulation of the ten policy instruments generally considered to make up the Washington Consensus comes from John Williamson, who formalized the package in 1989. See John Williamson, ed., Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has It Happened? (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1990). 5. John Williamson, “Did the Washington Consensus Fail?” (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, November 6, 2002), http://www.iie.com/publications/papers/paper.cfm?

It is worth noting that this advice is very different from what mainstream development institutions have been dispensing to poor countries for the past two generations. In the 1980s and 1990s, expert advice converged around the Washington Consensus. Influenced by the Ronald Reagan–Margaret Thatcher push for bigger roles for markets and smaller roles for government, the Washington Consensus advocated a sharp curb on government spending and involvement in shaping markets. Its pillars included ensuring macroeconomic stability, cutting subsidies, deregulating markets, privatizing national companies, and liberalizing trade—as Rodrik summarizes it: “Stabilize, privatize, and liberalize.”4 International financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank played a large role in crystallizing this package into mainstream orthodoxy and guaranteeing its implementation, often by making much-needed economic assistance to developing countries conditional on their agreement to these prescriptive reforms.


pages: 356 words: 103,944

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, George Akerlof, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Multi Fibre Arrangement, night-watchman state, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey

As he spent more time in Africa, he would increasingly focus on domestic constraints on development: low levels of education, poor health standards, dismal agricultural productivity, and inadequate investment in public infrastructure.23 The failure of the Washington Consensus left economists with a conundrum. Repudiating the specific reforms on the agenda was not an attractive option. Trade liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and the other reforms still seemed eminently reasonable: they would make poor nations’ policies look more like those of the advanced market economies. An explicit rejection of these reforms would have forced economists to abandon some of their most fundamental tenets. The problem with the Washington Consensus had to lie elsewhere. The rehabilitation took the form of retaining the Washington Consensus but expanding it to include a wide range of additional reforms.

Journal of Monetary Economics, vol. 53, no. 5 (July 2006), pp. 981–1019. 20 John Williamson, “Did the Washington Consensus Fail?” Outline of Speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC, November 6, 2002, online at http://www.iie.com/publications/papers/ paper.cfm?ResearchID=488. The term “damaged brand” was used in Moisés Naím, “Washington Consensus: A Damaged Brand,” Financial Times, October 28, 2002. British prime minister Gordon Brown officially pronounced the death of the Washington Consensus in early 2009. 21 Sachs and Warner, “Economic Reform,” p. 44. 22 See Dani Rodrik, “Growth Strategies,” in Philippe Aghion and Steven Durlauf, eds., Handbook of Economic Growth, Vol. 1A (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2005). 23 Jeffrey Sachs’s more recent worldview is captured in Jeffrey D.

An early version of the revisionist package was codified in the so-called “Washington Consensus.” Coined in 1989 by the economist John Williamson, the term originally referred to some of the common elements in the reforms that Latin American countries had embarked on at the time. Williamson’s original list contained ten distinct reforms, with a heavy emphasis on deregulation, trade and financial liberalization, privatization, avoidance of currency overvaluation, and fiscal discipline. Over time, the “Washington Consensus” was transformed into a more doctrinaire approach, a mantra for the über-liberalizers.


Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, classic study, declining real wages, deindustrialization, full employment, invisible hand, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, land reform, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, Washington Consensus

The term “neoliberalism” suggests a system of principles that is both new and based on classical liberal ideas: Adam Smith is revered as the patron saint. The doctrinal system is also known as the “Washington consensus,” which suggests something about global order. A closer look shows that the suggestion about global order is fairly accurate, but not the rest. The doctrines are not new, and the basic assumptions are far from those that have animated the liberal tradition since the Enlightenment. THE WASHINGTON CONSENSUS The neoliberal Washington consensus is an array of market oriented principles designed by the government of the United States and the international financial institutions that it largely dominates, and implemented by them in various ways—for the more vulnerable societies, often as stringent structural adjustment programs.

Smith’s concern was “the wealth of nations,” but he understood that the “national interest” is largely a delusion: within the “nation” there are sharply conflicting interests, and to understand policy and its effects we have to ask where power lies and how it is exercised, what later came to be called class analysis. The “principal architects” of the neoliberal “Washington consensus” are the masters of the private economy, mainly huge corporations that control much of the international economy and have the means to dominate policy formation as well as the structuring of thought and opinion. The United States has a special role in the system for obvious reasons. To borrow the words of diplomatic historian Gerald Haines, who is also senior historian of the CIA, “Following World War II the United States assumed, out of self-interest, responsibility for the welfare of the world capitalist system.”

By 1990 the percentages were reversed, and by 1995 about 95 percent of the vastly greater sums were speculative, with daily flows regularly exceeding the combined foreign exchange reserves of the seven biggest industrial powers, over $1 trillion a day, and very short-term: about 80 percent with round trips of a week or less. Prominent economists warned over twenty years ago that the process would lead to a low-growth, low-wage economy, and suggested fairly simple measures that might prevent these consequences. But the principal architects of the Washington consensus preferred the predictable effects, including very high profits. These effects were augmented by the (short-term) sharp rise in oil prices and the telecommunications revolution, both related to the huge state sector of the US economy, to which I will return. The so-called “Communist” states were outside this global system.


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Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values by Sharon Beder

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, junk bonds, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Powell Memorandum, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, spread of share-ownership, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Torches of Freedom, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, young professional

Thailand’s Minister of Finance, Tarrin Nimmanahaeminda, received his BA from Harvard and obtained an MBA in finance at Stanford as well . . .13 THE WASHINGTON CONSENSUS AND STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT In 1990 John Williamson, an economist with experience working for the World Bank, the IMF, and the UK Treasury, compiled a list of free market policies that were being pressed onto Latin American nations ‘by the powers-that-be in Washington’. He called this package of economic ‘reforms’ the ‘Washington Consensus’.14 The World Bank calls it the ‘market-friendly view’. His list covered: • Fiscal Discipline: Reduced budget deficits at all levels of government (after taking account of debt). • Public Expenditure Priorities: Redirecting government expenditure from areas of public demand that provide little economic return to areas with ‘high economic returns and the potential to improve income distribution, such as primary health and education, and infrastructure’. • Tax Reform: Broadening the tax base and cutting marginal tax rates to provide more incentive to high income earners to invest their money. • Financial Liberalization: Aiming towards market-determined interest rates and the abolition of preferential interest rates for privileged borrowers. • Exchange Rates: Setting exchange ‘to induce a rapid growth in nontraditional exports’, as well as to ensure exporters remain competitive. • Trade Liberalization: Reduction of tariffs and trade restrictions. • Foreign Direct Investment: Abolition of barriers to investment by foreign firms and foreign firms to be treated on the same basis as local firms. • Privatization: Privatizing government businesses and assets. • Deregulation: Abolition of regulations that impede investment or restrict competition, and requirement that all regulations be justified ‘by such criteria as safety, environmental protection, or prudential supervision of financial institutions’. • Property Rights: Securing property rights without excessive costs.15 ECONOMIC ADVISERS 149 These measures, a codified version of the Chicago School prescriptions, were measures that would expand business opportunities, reduce the cost of doing business and minimize the regulations that business would have to abide by.

. • Property Rights: Securing property rights without excessive costs.15 ECONOMIC ADVISERS 149 These measures, a codified version of the Chicago School prescriptions, were measures that would expand business opportunities, reduce the cost of doing business and minimize the regulations that business would have to abide by. They were the policies being promoted by corporate-funded think tanks in the US and the UK. The ‘Washington Consensus’ was pushed by Washington policy networks supported by large corporations and international financial interests and incorporated into an economic reform agenda for most countries in the world. Williamson recognized the role of economic advisers in achieving the Washington Consensus. He used the term ‘technopols’ to describe the ‘burgeoning breed of economic technocrats who assume positions of political responsibility’.16 These people were not only ‘able to judge what institutions and policies are needed in specific circumstances in order to further economic objectives’ but also had the political skills and ability to persuade others to adopt those policies.17 Technopols, like corporate-funded think tanks, played a key role in ensuring business-friendly measures were adopted in affluent countries by governments of many different political persuasions during the 1980s, including the conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Ronald Reagan in the US and Brian Mulroney in Canada, and labour/social democratic governments in Australia and New Zealand.

Some countries that had declined the IMF’s ‘enhanced structural adjustment’ loans were in contrast better off.27 ECONOMIC ADVISERS 151 In the two decades before the introduction of the Washington Consensus, when government spending and welfare schemes were looked on with approval (1960–1980), the income per person grew by 73 per cent in Latin America and 34 per cent in Africa. In the following two decades, as the Washington consensus was implemented, incomes in Africa declined by 23 per cent and the Latin American economies have only grown by 6 per cent.28 In developing countries life expectancy has dropped.


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Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, deindustrialization, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Irish property bubble, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, short selling, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The most remarkable thing about this ordoliberalization of Europe is how it replicates the same error often attributed to the Anglo-American economies: the insistence that all developing states follow their liberal instruction sheets to get rich, the so-called Washington Consensus approach to development that we shall discuss shortly. The basic objection made by late-developing states, such as the countries of East Asia, to the Washington Consensus/Anglo-American idea “liberalize and then growth follows” was twofold. First, this understanding mistakes the outcomes of growth, stable public finances, low inflation, cost competitiveness, and so on, for the causes of growth.

In the case of the developing world, however, the IMF became the financial police force behind the implementation of what were termed “structural adjustment programs”: also known as the Washington Consensus checklist applied in practice.82 As Dani Rodrik notes, IMF policy in this period, aided and abetted by the World Bank, devolved to a mantra of “stabilize, privative, and liberalize” as “codified in John Williamson’s well-known Washington Consensus.”83 The result was a series of one-size-fits-all policies that were applied from Azerbaijan to Zambia whose objective was to “minimize fiscal deficits, minimize inflation, minimize tariffs, maximize privatization, maximize liberalization of finance.”84 It was, in other words, “expansionary fiscal austerity” in a developmental form, and the results were, by and large, terrible.

As the model’s author Jacques Polak put it, what the IMF sought to do was to distinguish between “credit to the private sector (usually to be encouraged) and credit to the government sector (usually to be discouraged)” because the “balance of payments problems that brought countries to seek the assistance of the IMF were typically due to bursts of excessive domestic expansion [that] could usually be cured by the introduction of financial restraint.”90 The reason for such an austere policy was that “excessive expansion” causes both the current account and fiscal deficits to rise, which will “crowd out investment by the private sector.”91 In short, deep beneath the IMF’s Keynesian surface in the 1940s a set of classical liberal assumptions was built into a model of the behavior of states that would not have been out of place in the British Treasury of the 1920s.92 The Polak model, a mainstay of IMF practice, primed the IMF to accept the conclusions of the Washington Consensus long before Washington Consensus ideas became the austere instruction sheet of the 1990s. That the liberal contradictions at the heart of postwar Keynesianism came into their first flowering at the IMF was not surprising. After all, the top management of this organization was from its inception dominated by people who hailed from central banks, treasuries, and ministries of finance—the institutions in which the “can’t live with it, don’t want to pay for it” form of liberalism was most likely to survive.93 Given all this, you might think that the limited success of “austerity in the Global South” would encourage a rethink of these policies.


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Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All by Costas Lapavitsas

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, false flag, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, Flash crash, full employment, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, global village, High speed trading, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market bubble, means of production, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pensions crisis, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Simon Kuznets, special drawing rights, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, union organizing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Others, however, have looked at these changes from a more sympathetic perspective; see, for instance, Neil Gilbert, Transformation of the Welfare State, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 24 The term ‘subordinate financialization’ was originally suggested by Jeff Powell. 25 The term ‘Washington Consensus’ was coined by John Williamson; see Williamson, ‘What Washington Means by Policy Reform’, in Latin American Readjustment: How Much has Happened?, ed. John Williamson, Washington: Institute for International Economics, 1990; John Williamson, ‘The Washington Consensus Revisited’, in Economic and Social Development into the XXI Century, ed. Louis Emmerij, Washington: Inter-American Development Bank, 1997. Joseph Stiglitz has put forth a sustained critique of the Washington Consensus in an effort to develop a Post-Washington Consensus drawing on the notion of market failure typically through information asymmetries; Joseph Stiglitz, ‘More Instruments and Broader Goals: Moving Toward the Post Washington Consensus’, 7 January 1998; Joseph Stiglitz, ‘Whither Reform?

The results in terms of investment, efficiency and growth have been mediocre, but financial liberalization in developing countries has gradually accrued several other features, including introduction of stock markets; by the late 1980s it had morphed into an integrated development strategy, the Washington Consensus. Guided and enforced by the World Bank and the IMF, the Washington Consensus forced changes in domestic finance in developing countries generally favouring a shift away from bank-based, relational, government-controlled structures toward market-based, arm’s-length, private institutions and mechanisms.25 Financialization of developing countries began to take shape on this basis in the late 1990s and the 2000s. A fundamental component of the Washington Consensus has been the opening of domestic economies to international capital flows, typically on the grounds that capital would flow from rich to poor countries, thus promoting development.

Joseph Stiglitz has put forth a sustained critique of the Washington Consensus in an effort to develop a Post-Washington Consensus drawing on the notion of market failure typically through information asymmetries; Joseph Stiglitz, ‘More Instruments and Broader Goals: Moving Toward the Post Washington Consensus’, 7 January 1998; Joseph Stiglitz, ‘Whither Reform? Ten Years Of The Transition’, World Bank, Annual Bank Conference On Development Economics, 28–30 April 1999. For analysis of both the Washington and the Post-Washington Consensus from a Marxist and heterodox standpoint, see Ben Fine, Costas Lapavitsas, and Jonathan Pincus (eds), Development Policy in the Twenty-first Century: Beyond the Post-Washington Consensus, London: Routledge, 2001; and Costas Lapavitsas and Makoto Noguchi (eds), Beyond Market-Driven Development: Drawing on the Experience of Asia and Latin America, London: Routledge, 2005. 26 For the factors accounting for the growth of FDI, bank and portfolio flows between developed and developing as well as among developing countries, see the world investment reports by UNCTAD for the years 1999, 2002, 2003, 2005, and 2006. 27 Considerable care is needed in interpreting FDI.


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The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

But our response so far has been to accelerate the shift. Donald Trump’s victory crystallises the West’s failure to come to terms with the reality it faces. —— At some point during the 2008 global financial crisis, the Washington Consensus died. In truth, that economic model had been declared a ‘damaged brand’ back in 2003 by John Williamson, the man who coined the term in the late 1980s.13 The Washington Consensus prescribed open trading systems, free movement of capital and central bank monetary discipline. Countries that swallowed the prescription suffered terribly during the 1995 Mexican tesobono crisis, the 1997 Asian flu crisis, and in Russia, Brazil and elsewhere during the later 1990s.

South Korea and Mexico duly liberalised their capital accounts to join in the early 1990s. The destabilising effects of the hot money that flooded into those economies and then out again was almost instant. Most of the world has since chosen China’s more pragmatic path of opening slowly and on its own terms. China’s unorthodox route to development exposed the limits of the Washington Consensus. It had assumed that there was one way to do things, and that the rest of the world would have little choice but to adopt it. China is simply too big, and too important to the world’s bottom line, to push around. Other developing countries have followed China’s cue. Call it the Beijing Consensus.

I began this book with a reminiscence about the fall of the Berlin Wall. A decade later, I found myself employed as speechwriter to Lawrence Summers, when he was the US Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration. Looking back, I am astonished at that era’s unshakeable self-confidence. This was the high noon of the Washington Consensus. Alongside Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, and Robert Rubin, the previous Treasury Secretary, Summers personified the global intellectual elite. Though often abrasive, he is also brilliant – especially when he is wrong. But when the facts change he is capable of changing his mind.


pages: 290 words: 76,216

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed by Robert Skidelsky

additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, George Akerlof, George Santayana, global supply chain, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, precariat, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

This chapter traces ‘growth’ economics from the insights of the classical economists to the emergence of development economics as a distinct subfield of economics in the second half of the twentieth century, and the gradual dissolution of the developmental perspective into the neoclassical Washington Consensus. Population If the economist is a tragedian, the Revd Thomas Malthus has a claim to be considered its tragedian in chief. Before Malthus there was the allure of a more prosperous future; after him gloom. For the first fifty years of the nineteenth century, economics was known as the ‘dismal science’.

First in the field were the ‘big push’ theories of the 1940s and 1950s, designed to turn poor countries into rich ones in double-quick time. These were based on a structuralist analysis of the economy, ancestrally derived from the doctrines of Friedrich List. The alleged failure of the big push growth policies led, in the 1970s and 1980s, to a swing back to neoclassical economics, which came to be embodied in the Washington Consensus. Structuralism Development theories can be called structural because they take as their unit of analysis the structure of the world capitalist system. They viewed this not as an integrated market peopled by competitive firms but as a binary system with an advanced centre and a lagging periphery.

Dependency theory brings us back to the picture of the economist as tragedian. Because development of the periphery within the capitalist system is cut off, a socialist revolution is the only path to the conquest of poverty. This will at the same time destroy capitalism at the centre, by undercutting its sole remaining source of profit. Washington Consensus A more durable reaction to the alleged failure of import-substitution policies was a drift back to neoclassical economics. It started to be argued that what was needed was not expensive steel mills and motor car industries which could not sell their products for hard currencies, but labour-intensive production based on exploiting the existing comparative advantage poor countries enjoyed in cheap, docile labour.


State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century by Francis Fukuyama

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, centre right, corporate governance, demand response, Doha Development Round, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, Hernando de Soto, information asymmetry, liberal world order, Live Aid, Nick Leeson, Pareto efficiency, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

In response to these trends, the advice offered by international financial institutions (IFIs) like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, as well as by the U.S. government, emphasized a collection of measures intended to reduce the degree of state intervention in economic affairs—a package designated as the “Washington consensus” by one of its formulators (Williamson 1994) or as “neoliberalism” by its detractors in Latin America. The Washington consensus has been relentlessly attacked in the early twenty-first century, not just by antiglobalization protesters but also by academic critics with better credentials in economics (see Rodrik 1997; Stiglitz 2002). In retrospect, there was nothing wrong with the Washington consensus per se: The state sectors of developing countries were in very many cases obstacles to growth and could only be fixed in the long run through economic liberalization.

There is no question that it is better to be in quadrant I than in quadrant IV, but is it better to be in quadrant II, with strong institutions and an extensive state, or quadrant III, with weak institutions and a limited state? In the early 1990s many economists preferred quadrant III on the grounds that markets would be selforganizing or that institutions and residual state capabilities would somehow take care of themselves. The so-called Washington consensus was a perfectly sensible list of economic policy measures that were designed to move countries leftward along the X-axis through reduced tariff protection, privatization, reduction of subsidies, deregulation, and so forth. There is no reason, after all, for the Brazilian government to operate steel mills or for Argentina to create a domestic automobile industry.

(In Kenya, for example, the employees of the office of the president grew from 18,213 in 1971 to 43,230 in 1990.) No international lender or bilateral donor at any time wanted this outcome, yet none were able to structure their conditionality in a way to prevent it from happening because of their inability to control local political outcomes. Many proponents of the Washington consensus now say that they of course understood the importance of institutions, rule of law, and the proper sequencing of reforms. But Y-axis questions of state capacity and state-building were largely absent from policy discussion in the late 1980s to early 1990s. There were very few warnings issued from Washington-based policymakers about the dangers of liberalization in the absence of proper institutions.


pages: 484 words: 136,735

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Available from http://www2.goldmansachs.com/ideas/brics/book/BRIC-Full.pdf. 2 Summarizing the conclusions of April 2009 G20 summit in London Gordon Brown declared: “The old Washington Consensus is over.” See Jonathan Weisman and Alistair Macdonald, “Obama, Brown Strike Similar Note on Economy,” Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2009. See also a 2009 article by John Williamson, who coined the phrase: John Williamson, “The ‘Washington Consensus’: Another Near-Death Experience?” Peterson Institute for International Economics, April 10, 2009. Available from http://www.iie.com/realtime/?p=604. See as well Dani Rodrik, “Is There a New Washington Consensus?” Business Standard, June 12, 2008. 3 Unattributable interview with the author in Anatole Kaletsky, “We Need a New Capitalism to Take on China, The Times, London, February 4, 2010. 4 “‘China’s Spirit,’ a ‘Great Wall’ at Heart Built to Ward Off Global Crisis,” People’s Daily, July 30, 2009. 5 Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Beijing Consensus. 6 Two of the best recent books are Will Hutton, The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century, and Bill Emmott, Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade. 7 If China continues to grow at an average annual rate of 8 percent without any interruption, its living standards will catch up with those in Portugal, the poorest western European country, by around 2030.

Now, after watching the near-collapse of global capitalism and the damage done to Western democracies by the crisis, citizens, as well as political leaders, of many developing countries are having second thoughts. The apparent failure of Western capitalism has discredited liberalism in the eyes of many developing countries, as even the principle promoters of the Washington Consensus, the IMF and World Bank, have acknowledged in a series of confessional reports.2 As a senior U.S. diplomat remarked a few months after the crisis: “Developing countries have lost interest in the old Washington Consensus that promoted democracy and liberal economics. Wherever I go in the world, governments and business leaders talk about the new Beijing Consensus—the Chinese route to prosperity and power.

Bush, far from supporting the U.S. government’s attempts to save the economy and financial system, formed an unholy alliance with neo-socialists and unrepentant Marxists to declare that free-enterprise capitalism was dead. Instead of the American Century, proclaimed by neo-conservatives a few years earlier, China’s rise to global dominance in the decades ahead now seemed as inevitable. Around the world, finance ministers and diplomats prepared to abandon the Washington Consensus presented to developing countries throughout the previous twenty years as the only way to achieve economic progress.1 The Beijing Consensus was the new buzzword, even if no one was quite sure what it meant.2 Yet within a few months of the collapse of Lehman and the election of a new American government, it became obvious that reports of capitalism’s death were exaggerated and premature.


pages: 221 words: 55,901

The Globalization of Inequality by François Bourguignon

Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, minimum wage unemployment, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Gordon, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, very high income, Washington Consensus

., 87 Russia, 37, 46t Saez, Emmanuel, 48, 160–61 savings, 93, 174 Segal, Paul, 13n4 Sen, Amartya, 14, 61 Senegal, 46t, 54 sensitive urban zones (ZUS), 66 shocks, 38, 55, 91–92, 175 Singapore, 34, 82 Slemrod, Joel, 160–61 Slim, Carlos, 111 social justice, 2, 24, 60, 70, 142 social security, 37 South Africa, 16, 23, 46t, 156 South Korea, 34, 46t, 57, 82 Soviet Union, 26, 37, 75, 149, 153 Spain, 6, 46t, 53, 102, 135 standard of living, 184; absolute, 23, 31–32; after normalization, 29; average, 2, 13, 16, 18, 21, 43; between countries, 2–3, 7, 10, 17, 33, 36, 38–39, 42; China and, 120–22; convergence and, 7, 147–48; countries included in estimation of, 46t; definitions of, 17; distribution and, 16, 18, 24, 26–27; evolution of inequality and, 25–26, 41, 43–45, 46t, 53– 55, 58, 60–62, 67, 69, 73; extreme deciles of, 18, 21–23, 28, 36; factor of proportionality and, 13; fairer globalization and, 146–48, 154, 156–58, 160, 165, 168–69; GDP measurement of, 14 (see also gross domestic product (GDP) measurement); global inequality and, 10–26, 29, 31–33, 36, 39; globalization and, 120–23, 126, 138, 143; great gap in, 33–36; international inequality and, 17; median, 24; OECD countries and, 11–12, 43, 50–52, 64, 94, 99, 102, 107, 120, 149, 159, 162, 164–65; Povcal data and, 12; purchasing power and, 11, 13, 19–24, 27f, 28, 50, 80, 144, 158, 178; relative gap in, 18, 20, 30– 32, 36; rise in inequality and, 106–8, 113–14; welfare and, 31; within countries and, 2 Stiglitz, Joseph, 4, 14, 136n10, 138 subsidies, 109–10, 175 superstars, 85–87, 89–90 surveys: evolution of inequality and, 42t, 43–45, 56, 68n17, 69– 71; fairer globalization and, 169; global inequality and, 10, 12– 15, 20n10, 21–22, 29, 42t, 43– 208 surveys (cont.) 45; globalization and, 127n4, 141n15; PISA, 169–70 Sweden, 46t, 51f, 59, 87, 90, 92– 94, 164, 171–72 Taiwan, 34, 82 taxes: Brazil and, 173; capital mobility and, 93; Chile and, 173; China and, 165; credit and, 164; cutting rates of, 188; educational policy and, 167–73; effective rate of, 159–60; emerging economies and, 165; estate, 187; evolution of inequality of, 12–14, 37, 48, 50, 56n5; fairer globalization and, 148, 158–73, 175, 181–83; France and, 92–93; Germany and, 92; globalization and, 129–30, 135–36, 142–45; havens for, 160, 162, 182, 187, 189; ignoring role of, 12–13; income, 37, 89n10, 92–93, 145, 159, 161–65, 170; India and, 165; inheritance, 145, 171–73; institutions and, 92–94; investment and, 92; labor and, 159– 60, 171; liberalization and, 93; Morocco and, 173; national inequality and, 158–73, 175, 181– 83; profit and, 93; rate ceiling on, 161–62; Reagan and, 92; redistribution through, 4, 158–67; reform and, 92–94, 163, 183, 189; rise in inequality and, 74, 89n10, 91–94, 104, 114–15; Sweden and, 92–93, 172; Thatcher and, 92; transfers and, 158–67; United Kingdom and, 92–94; United States and, 92– 93, 159–60, 164; value added, 92 Index technology: artists and, 86–87; communication, 78, 85–87, 96; data transfer, 78; development gap and, 34–35, 83; fairer globalization and, 156, 173; global inequality and, 3–4, 34–35; globalization and, 118–20, 125; income and, 34, 180; increased audiences and, 86–87; information, 78, 85, 88; movies and, 87; as product of globalization, 86; progress in, 3–4, 34–35, 76, 85– 86, 90–91, 114–15, 118–19, 125, 156, 173, 180; publishing and, 87; rise in inequality and, 34, 74, 76–78, 80, 82, 85–91, 96, 114–15, 180; sports and, 87; television and, 87; writers and, 86–87 terrorism, 139 Tetra Pak, 172 Thailand, 16 Thatcher, Margaret, 91–92, 94, 101 Theil coefficient, 18–19; decomposition of, 37–38, 42; evolution of inequality and, 42 Third World, 149 “too big to fail” concept, 174–75 transportation, 76, 155 TRIPS (Agreement on Trade-­ Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), 156 tuition, 170 U2 (band), 87 Uganda, 46t, 54 unions, 100–106, 108, 156, 179 United Kingdom: Big Bang and, 95; competition and, 78–79; deregulation and, 94, 97n14; evolution of inequality and, 46t, 50, 51f, 59, 67, 68n17; fairer global- Index209 ization and, 163, 169; manufacturing and, 80; real earnings loss and, 78; rise in inequality and, 21, 91–94, 97n14; taxes and, 92–94; Thatcher and, 91–92, 94, 101 United Nations, 149, 185 United States: African Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA) and, 155; Cold War and, 149, 153; competition and, 78–79; Current Population Survey and, 21; deregulation and, 94–95, 97– 98, 102–8; evolution of inequality and, 47–50, 51f, 58, 59n9, 66–70, 73; fairer globalization and, 155, 159–61, 163–64, 169, 174–75, 182; Gini coefficient of, 21; globalization and, 135–39; manufacturing and, 80; Occupy Wall Street movement and, 6, 135; Reagan and, 91–92, 101; real earnings loss and, 78; rise in inequality and, 2, 4–6, 9, 11, 21, 33, 46t, 73, 77–80, 91–95, 97– 98, 102–8; taxes and, 92–93, 159–60, 164; Washington consensus and, 109–10, 153 U.S. Congressional Budget Office, 49–50 value added, 56–58, 60, 92 violence, 66, 133–35, 139 wage ladder effects, 78–79 Wall Street, 6, 90, 135 Washington consensus, 109–10, 153 wealth: bonuses and, 87, 174; developed/developing countries and, 3, 10, 16, 21, 28, 47, 58–60, 72; distribution of, 4 (see also distribution); evolution of inequality and, 58–60; executives and, 73, 88–89, 97, 174; fairer globalization and, 162, 164, 167, 170–73; globalization and, 125, 127, 129, 131–32, 139, 143–45; great gap and, 33–36; high incomes and, 50, 52, 56, 85–93, 97–99, 140, 143, 158–62, 164, 189; income gap and, 3, 5–6, 27f, 42t, 44t, 149; inflation and, 50, 95, 102, 110; inheritance and, 93, 144–45, 170–73; lawyers and, 89–90; measuring inequality and, 18; middle class and, 51, 71, 93, 109, 133–34, 136, 140; portfolios and, 88; poverty and, 1, 11, 15n6, 19–20, 22–25, 28–29, 32, 44t, 109, 117, 123, 126–27, 134, 144, 147–52, 164, 166, 175; purchasing power and, 11, 13, 19–24, 27f, 28, 50, 80, 144, 158, 178; real earnings loss and, 78; real estate and, 131; redistribution and, 167–73; relative gap and, 18, 28, 30, 31–32, 36; rise in inequality and, 74, 95, 98; superstars and, 85–87, 89–90; taxes and, 187 (see also taxes); transfers and, 4, 14, 48, 105, 110, 130, 135–36, 142, 148, 153, 158–67, 170, 175, 181, 183, 187 welfare: global, 31; individual, 6; rate of progress and, 5; social, 14; specific nations and, 7; United Kingdom and, 94 Wilkinson, Richard, 140 women: discrimination and, 64– 66, 69, 132, 142, 180–81; labor and, 114; rise in inequality and, 103 210 World Bank, 10, 11n2, 23, 29n16, 43, 54, 68n18, 90, 109, 149 World’s Apart (Milanovic), 4–5 World Trade Organization, 86, 154 World War I era, 37, 160 Index World War II era, 26, 34, 37, 48, 92, 162 writers, 86–87 Zaire, 151 Zucman, Gabriel, 59n8, 161–62

These structural adjustment policies have often been criticized for their social costs, partly because they slowed growth and thus the reduction of poverty dramatically, and partly because they placed more of the brunt of the costs of these programs on the lower and middle classes, rather than on the high end of the income scale.23 The debt crisis began in Latin America, specifically in Mexico in 1982, and for a decade and a half it would have harsh consequences for the developing world, in particular in sub-­Saharan Africa and Latin America. The structural adjustment programs that the international financial institutions demanded in exchange for aid were grounded on a package of free market principles that were later baptized the “Washington consensus.” They resulted in deep institutional changes: commercial and financial liberalization, deregulation of goods, capital and labor markets, privatization, the elimination of consumer and producer subsidies, 23 See IMF-­IEO, Fiscal Adjustment in IMF-­Supported Programs, IMF, June 2002. 110 Chapter 3 cuts in social spending, and so forth.

However, inequality had shot up in the adjustment process. The Gini coefficient, which was 0.50 in 1999, had risen to 0.54 in 2003 at the moment when the crisis was on the verge of turning back. It has since gone back down. While this is true, there is little doubt that several structural reforms typical of the Washington consensus, in contrast to policies focused more directly on reestablishing macroeconomic equilibrium, such as those used by the Argentine government in response to the 2001 crisis (devaluation, disinflation, budgetary tightening), have had an inegalitarian effect on certain countries. This is certainly the case for policies like the elimination of input and output price subsidies for small farmers, the abandoning of consumer price subsidies, the rise in prices for certain priva- The Forces behind R ising Inequality 111 tized services, and, after some time delay, the cuts in public social spending on education and health.


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Dirty Secrets How Tax Havens Destroy the Economy by Richard Murphy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, centre right, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, high net worth, income inequality, intangible asset, Leo Hollis, light touch regulation, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Washington Consensus

But the pervasiveness of this philosophy has had enormous spill-over effects. The world’s major economic institutions, such as the World Bank and IMF, have proved remarkably comfortable with the Washington Consensus. Their endorsement has resulted in its ten-point policy prescription being forcibly imposed on a great many countries, including a number of developing nations that have consequently suffered enormous losses of revenue and resources, as well as corruption. In addition, the Washington Consensus policy prescriptions have become the basis for the thinking of the vast majority of mainstream political parties in many of the world’s democracies.

In the last thirty-five years, neoliberalism achieved near-hegemonic status in economics faculties and government departments alike. The ideas implicit in it are treated as a revealed truth, rather than a construct of a particular group with an ideological agenda. These ideas can be summarised as the components of what is known as the Washington Consensus:10 1.Fiscal discipline, requiring strict criteria for limiting budget deficits; 2.Setting public expenditure priorities that spend away from subsidies and administration towards previously neglected fields with high economic returns; 3.Tax reform, embracing broadening of the tax base and cutting marginal tax rates; 4.Financial liberalisation, particularly with regard to interest rates that should be market-determined; 5.Exchange rates that promote exports; 6.Trade liberalisation; 7.Reduced barriers to foreign direct investment; 8.Privatisation; 9.Deregulation; 10.The protection of intellectual property rights.

From there, the spread of such policies was not limited to parties of the right; it is fair to suggest, for example, that the Clinton administration of 1992–2000 endorsed many of the same ideas. Indeed, its abolition of the Glass–Steagall Act, which deregulated much of the US banking sector, was influenced by the philosophy of the Washington Consensus. Tony Blair’s New Labour governments in the UK were equally neoliberal in their outlook. The results have been unsurprising. Over the recent period, social democracy has very largely ceased to be either social or democratic, under the influence of such economic thinking. Over time, it has become increasingly difficult for parties branded as something they are not to be elected, especially in Europe.


pages: 272 words: 71,487

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More by Charles Kenny

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, inventory management, Kickstarter, Milgram experiment, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Robert Solow, seminal paper, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, very high income, Washington Consensus, X Prize

What connected these policies was a belief that governments had played an overactive role in promoting development, taking on tasks best left to the private sector and abusing powers best left unused. According to the Washington Consensus, widespread government interventionism was not only unnecessary to promote growth, it was the chief blockage to achieving that growth. Yet it was very difficult to push through Washington Consensus reforms, and when they were put into effect, they had limited impact, encouraging the profession to look elsewhere for ultimate explanations for low growth. If the reforms were right but not working, the problem had to be the reformers and the environment for reform.

This adapted model allowed for poorer countries to grow more slowly than rich ones indefinitely—at least until the factor or factors restricting the diffusion of technology to a poor country were removed. In tandem with these developments in economic theory, the 1980s saw the evolution of a set of development policy recommendations that came to be known as the Washington Consensus. It was “Washington” because it was spearheaded by US economists and policy wonks, and supported by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund headquartered in the American capital. And a “Consensus” because nearly everyone in Washington agreed about what the developing world should do to kick-start economic development.

He covered topics such as education, insufficient market reforms to encourage entrepreneurship, and authoritarian versus participatory methods of development. Going back a bit further, to 1776, we see that still other contentions about growth are firmly rooted in the founding document of economics, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. In other words, the Nobel Prize winners, the Washington Consensus, the Rimsim modelers: All were echoing centuries-old ideas. This calls into question not their sincerity or their smarts but, rather, their originality. Economists have (for good or ill) “formalized” their interpretations in their models over the past forty years. Now, a statement suggesting that a culture of thrift might encourage savings and (through investment) impact growth, as it might be, has to be expressed in a conga line of formulas before it is worthy of publication in the American Economic Review.


pages: 391 words: 102,301

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 2. 6. See Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (London: Black Swan, 2001). 7. Williamson’s own account of what he meant can be found in John Williamson, “A Short History of the Washington Consensus,” Fundación CIDOB paper, presented at a conference titled “From the Washington Consensus Towards a New Global Governance,” Barcelona, September 24, 2004. Available from http://www.piie.com/publications/ papers/williamson0904-2.pdf. 8. Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (London: Allen Lane, 2008), 214. 9.

Even Chile, where free-market reforms had been pursued by a military dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet, had turned back toward democracy with the election of a civilian government in 1989. The democratic transformation of Latin America was accompanied by a free-market revolution. The Latin dictatorships had generally pursued protectionist and state-led economic strategies. Their democratic successors were much more likely to follow the orthodox economic strategies of the “Washington Consensus”: a crackdown on inflation, a welcome for foreign investment, a more open trading regime, and privatization. Latin America’s transformation illustrates how contagious political and economic ideas can be—jumping across borders with all the energy of a determined virus. The continent had been through periods of synchronized political change before.

Prominent regional economists like the Peruvian Hernando de Soto became important contributors to the new liberal economics, with De Soto doing much to argue the case for the importance of property rights for the poor.6 Nonetheless, the new economics pursued across the continent came with the approval of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Since both mighty institutions were based in Washington, the free-market prescription became known as the “Washington Consensus”—a phrase dreamed up by John Williamson, an economist at the Institute for International Economics.7 Across Latin America, government pursued the new consensus policies: cutting tariffs and taxes, making life easier for foreign investors, allowing markets to set interest and exchange rates, cutting regulation, privatizing.


pages: 82 words: 24,150

The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism by Grace Blakeley

Anthropocene, asset-backed security, basic income, Big Tech, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, debt deflation, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, don't be evil, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, global value chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, income inequality, informal economy, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, price mechanism, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, reshoring, Rishi Sunak, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, social distancing, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, yield curve

The Global South is continuously promised that, if it only sticks to the prescriptions delivered by the institutions of the Washington Consensus – the IMF and the World Bank – it will ‘catch up’ with the Global North. In fact, ongoing neocolonial and imperialistic relationships between the Global North and South, not to mention the huge amount of money that escapes the world’s poorest states through money laundering and tax avoidance, have prevented most states in the global South from doing so – and the growth of the tech monopolies has only made these problems worse.35 Rigid followers of the Washington Consensus have sacrificed the health and well-being of their workers to increase the profits of international capital.

The IMF’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, has said that the fund has $1trn worth of resources to help its members tackle the pandemic, on top of the $160 billion in loans and grants already promised by the World Bank. But not all countries are eligible for these loans: preferential treatment is given to obedient adopters of the free trade and market based Washington Consensus. Unlike other poor countries, many of which are currently in deep debt distress, international investors have not yet turned on India and Bangladesh. As one of the first countries to implement the required neoliberal ‘reforms’, Bangladesh became something of a poster child for structural adjustment, even though poverty remains high.31 Today the country is highly dependent upon textiles manufacturing, where working conditions are notoriously poor, leading to disasters like the 2013 Dhaka factory collapse.

States in core countries would undertake this investment themselves, while transferring technology and resources to governments in the Global South to allow them to do the same. New international development banks could also be created to support those states most at risk of extreme weather events, desertification and rising temperatures. A break with the rules and norms associated with the Washington Consensus could help to rebuild trust in international institutions and support a new era of fair and sustainable global cooperation. While such a scenario might seem far-fetched, the costs of not acting would be extraordinarily high. The coronavirus crisis has provided the world with an insight into what life might look like as our environmental systems begin to collapse under the pressures of unending capitalist accumulation: a world ripped apart by a series of natural disasters, where many are unable to access the resources they need to survive, and strict limits must be imposed upon normal economic activity to prevent further deterioration of our natural systems.


pages: 322 words: 87,181

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik

3D printing, airline deregulation, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global value chain, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, open immigration, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Structural reform as a remedy for slow (or no) growth has been around at least since the early 1980s. At that time, in return for “structural adjustment” loans, the World Bank insisted on economy-wide liberalizing reforms for developing countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. These policies were then extended and codified in Latin America during the 1990s under the umbrella of the Washington Consensus. Many of the former socialist economies adopted similar policies (in some cases, voluntarily) when they opened up their economies during the 1990s. A serious look at the vast experience with privatization, deregulation, and liberalization since the 1980s—in Latin America, postsocialist economies, and Asia in particular—would have produced much less optimism about the reforms Athens was asked to swallow.

Over time, this best-practice mind-set would come to dominate the practical and policy work of international organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The detailed but fairly specific prescriptions of the Washington Consensus would be augmented by open-ended recommendations on reducing corruption, improving regulatory and judicial institutions, and enhancing governance more broadly. In an article published in 2000, I argued that the prevailing technocratic views on institutional reform were missing an important part of the picture.5 They ignored both the malleability and the context specificity of institutional designs.

It was due to the fact that such models were neglected in favor of models that stressed efficient markets. Then there are the errors of commission—cases in which economists’ fixation on one particular model of the world makes them complicit in the administration of policies whose failure could have been predicted ahead of time. Economists’ advocacy of neoliberal “Washington Consensus” policies and of financial globalization falls into this category. What happened in both cases is that economists overlooked serious second-best complications, such as learning externalities and weak institutions, which blunted the reforms and, in some cases, caused them to backfire. The Peculiar Science of Economics The firestorm over the Reinhart-Rogoff analysis overshadowed what in fact was a salutary process of scrutiny and refinement of economic research.


pages: 160 words: 46,449

The Extreme Centre: A Warning by Tariq Ali

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, deindustrialization, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Great Leap Forward, labour market flexibility, land reform, light touch regulation, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, obamacare, offshore financial centre, popular capitalism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck

Today Germany is the strongest country in Europe, despite its truncated sovereignty, and the EU, expanded out of control as a result of Anglo-American pressure, is groaning like a sick bull. Early attempts by the Frenchman Jacques Delors to create a ‘social Europe’ foundered on the born-again fanaticism of the Washington Consensus: neoliberal capitalism was the only way forward. The EU had to accept the new rules: privatizations at home, wars and occupations abroad. The Northern Europeans (Britain and Scandinavia) and the East Europeans (delighted to accept new satellite status, with the US replacing the USSR) proved to be the most loyal and compliant of the EU vassal states.

Bush: ‘The brutal fact is that Western Europe, and increasingly also Central Europe, remains largely an American protectorate, with its allied states reminiscent of ancient vassals and tributaries.’ Britain was so servile that it barely counted. Germany and France were important, and in any division between these two, the Germans should be supported. Brzezinski needn’t have worried. Under Jospin and Sarkozy the French Republic happily embraced the Washington Consensus, with French mediatic intellectuals proving even more willing than their German equivalents.7 There are no signs whatsoever of François Hollande breaking with this pattern, and in the unlikely event of a Red–Green victory at the next German elections, it would produce a government far closer to Washington than that of Angela Merkel.

They are regarded as such not only at home, but also by those who fear US withdrawal abroad: vassal politicians and states in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the loyal few in South America. The rulers of the only vassal continent – Australia – would, given its geography, be equally disturbed to contemplate independence. Yet in both the Arab world and the heartlands of Western capitalism, the systemic order imposed through the Washington Consensus since the collapse of the Soviet Union has appeared to be in forward flight. The Arab world seeks to escape its recent history, while some European states, in the grip of parliamentary paralysis, dream of external deliverance from the very bankers who were responsible for the crash of 2008.


pages: 466 words: 127,728

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

■ From Bretton Woods to Beijing The euro project is a part of the more broadly based international monetary system, which itself is subject to considerable stress and periodic reformation. Since the Second World War, the system has passed through distinct phases known as Bretton Woods, the Washington Consensus, and the Beijing Consensus. All three of these phrases are shorthand for shared norms of behavior in international finance, what are called the rules of the game. The Washington Consensus arose after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the late 1970s. The international monetary system was saved between 1980 and 1983 as Paul Volcker raised interest rates, and Ronald Reagan lowered taxes, and together they created the sound-dollar or King Dollar policy.

Williamson went on to describe what Washington meant by debtors “setting their houses in order.” He set forth ten policies that made up the Washington Consensus. These policies included commonsense initiatives such as fiscal discipline, elimination of wasteful subsidies, lower tax rates, positive real interest rates, openness to foreign investment, deregulation, and protection for property rights. The fact that these policies favored free-market capitalism and promoted the expansion of U.S. banks and corporations in global markets did not go unnoticed. By the early 2000s, the Washington Consensus was in tatters due to the rise of emerging market economies that viewed dollar hegemony as favoring the United States at their expense.

This view was highlighted by the IMF response to the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, in which IMF austerity plans resulted in riots and bloodshed in the cities of Jakarta and Seoul. Washington’s failure over time to adhere to its own fiscal prescriptions, combined with the acceleration of Asian economic growth after 1999, gave rise to the Beijing Consensus as a policy alternative to the Washington Consensus. The Beijing Consensus comes in conflicting versions and lacks the intellectual consistency that Williamson gave to the Washington Consensus. Author Joshua Cooper Ramo is credited with putting the phrase Beijing Consensus into wide use with his seminal 2004 article on the subject. Ramo’s analysis, while original and provocative, candidly admits that the definition of Beijing Consensus is amorphous: “the Beijing Consensus . . . is flexible enough that it is barely classifiable as a doctrine.”


pages: 191 words: 51,242

Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment by Lucas Chancel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anthropocene, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, energy transition, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, green new deal, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, very high income, Washington Consensus

The term Washington Consensus refers to an ideological consensus between the governments of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, at the beginning of the 1980s, subsequently transformed into a series of measures aimed at liberalizing commodity and capital markets and at reducing the role of the state in economic affairs. [On the controversy surrounding this term, see the 2004 paper by John Williamson, the English economist who coined it, “A Short History of the Washington Consensus” (commissioned by Fundación CIDOB for “From the Washington Consensus towards a new Global Governance,” Barcelona, Spain, September 24–25, 2004), https://piie.com/publications/papers/williamson0904-2.pdf.

Before examining these other forces, let us pause for a moment to note parenthetically an interesting and, to say the least, surprising interpretation of the origins of financial liberalization advanced by Rawi Abdelal, an authority on international management at Harvard Business School. In spite of its name, Abdelal argues, the so-called Washington Consensus on financial liberalization was first devised in France under a leftist president, François Mitterrand, whose economic advisors saw loosening capital flows as a way to hasten the formation of a patrimonial (or propertied) middle class.23 As we have just seen, the growth of financial wealth over the past several decades has mainly benefited those at the summit of the pyramid.

., 158n23; health care in, 20; income inequality in, 19, 24, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48; tax rates in, 55; vote to exit from E.U. by, 15; water consumption in, 72; well-being indicators in, 169n9 United Nations, 11–14, 60–61, 94, 142–144, 147, 150 United States: access to medical care in, 163n15; CO2e emissions by, 96–97, 98–99; energy consumption in, 69; environmental science initiatives in, 131–133; exit from Paris Agreement of, 32–33; extreme poverty in, 74; income inequality in, 19, 29, 32–33, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 48; land disputes in, 77; minimum wage in, 54, 159n26; opposition to SDGs by, 14; pollution in, 84, 133; public services in, 115–116; tax rates in, 55, 57; Washington Consensus, 53, 158n23; water consumption in, 72 vervets, 23 wage increases, 24, 27, 54, 159n26. See also economic inequality; wealth water: access to potable, 71–73, 116; contamination of, 86–87; public utilities networks for, 111, 115–117; shortages of, 73, 161n12. See also drought wealth: distribution of, 39–48, 111–113, 114; planetary destruction and, 95–97; political power of, 56–57.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

The innumerable failures of free market “shock therapy” and structural adjustment in the developing world of the 1980s and 1990s, the mediocre economic outcomes of most countries that followed the Washington Consensus down to the letter, as well as the macroeconomic instability triggered by deregulation and over-financialization in the West make this as close to a truism in economics. If China is the triumph of free-market capitalism in pursuit of human progress, I rest my case. Table 3.1: The Beijing consensus was to not follow Washington’s Notes: These are the ten main policies that were the basis of the Washington Consensus as originally defined by economist John Williamson.35 The Washington Consensus was the prevalent set of economic policy prescriptions for much of the 1990s applied to developing countries, especially to those that were emerging from crisis.

If New Optimists themselves don’t claim this openly, as does Norberg in this section’s opening quote, then there’s no dearth of free-market advocates and libertarians using these talking points for their own ends, like this piece from the Adam Smith Institute (a UK libertarian think tank) shows: OK, so what is it that our pushing of neoliberalism has done? You could look at that chart above from Max Roser. This last generation of globally applied neoliberalism, all that free trade, globalisation, that application of the Washington Consensus (that list of stupid things that governments should not do), what has been the effect? The greatest decline in absolute poverty in the history of our entire species. That decline has been so great that global inequality has been falling.27 By far the favorite New Optimist soundbite is a World Bank estimate that shows how extreme poverty in the world has dropped from 94% of the total population in 1820 to an estimate of less than 10% in 2015, the first time in history that it has reached the single digits.

Indeed, the guiding principle of “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” which described Deng’s reforms was that China required market reforms to grow economically so that a true egalitarian socialist society could emerge in the longer-run — market logic as a means to an end. Of the ten points in the “Washington Consensus” that was the standard template for IMF- and World Bank-led structural economic reform in the 1980s and 1990s, China’s model brazenly violates half of them, and only partially adheres to the other half. Markets have certainly proven superior to communist central planning, which led to disastrous Maoist experiments like the Great Leap Forward that left thirty million dead from famine.


pages: 232

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

.), Beyond Self-Help Housing, London 1992, pp. 298-99. 37 Andrew Harding, "Nairobi Slum Life," (series), Guardian, 4, 8, 10 and 15, October 2002. privatization of housing markets. However, the social state in the Third World was already withering away even before SAPs sounded the death knell for welfarism. Because so many experts working for the "Washington Consensus" have deemed government provision of urban housing to be an inevitable disaster, it is important to review some case histories, beginning with what, at first sight, seem to be the major exceptions to the rule of state failure. The two tropical cities where large-scale public housing has provided an alternative to slums are Singapore and Hong Kong.

In a review of recent studies, including a major report by the London-based Panos Institute, Rita Abrahamsen concludes that "rather than empowering 'civil society,' the PRSP process has entrenched the position of a small, homogeneous 'iron triangle' of transnational professionals based in key government ministries (especially Finance), multilateral and bilateral development agencies and international NGOs."19 What Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz in his brief tenure as chief economist for the Bank described as an emerging "post-Washington Consensus" might be better characterized as "soft imperialism," with the major NGOs captive to the agenda of the international donors, and grassroots groups similarly dependent upon the international NGOs.20 For all the glowing rhetoric about democratization, self-help, social capital, and the strengthening of civil society, the actual power relations in this new NGO universe resemble nothing so much as traditional clientelism.

Moreover, like the community organizations patronized by the War on Poverty in the 1960s, Third World NGOs have proven brilliant at coopting local leadership as well as hegemonizing the social space traditionally occupied by the Left Even if there are some celebrated exceptions - such as the militant NGOs so instrumental in creating the World Social Forums - the broad impact of the NGO/ "civil society revolution," as even some World Bank researchers acknowledge, has been to bureaucratize and deradicalize urban social movements.21 18 Sebastian Mallaby, The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations, New York 2004, pp. 89-90, 145. 19 Rita Abrahamsen, "Review Essay: Poverty Reduction or Adjustment by Another Name?," Review of African Political Economy 99 (2004), p. 185. 20 Stiglitz's 1998 speech, "More Instruments and Broader Goals: Moving Towards the Post-Washington Consensus," is discussed in John Pender, "From 'Structural Adjustment' to 'Comprehensive Development Framework': Conditionality Transformed?," Third World Quarterly 22:3 (2001). 21 Imparato and Ruster, Slum Upgrading and Participation, p. 255. Thus development economist Diana Mitlin, writing about Latin s America, describes how, on one hand, NGOs "preempt community- ; level capacity-building as they take over decision-making and negotiating roles," while, on the other hand, they are constrained by "the difficulties of managing donor finance, with its emphasis on shortterm project funds, on financial accountabilities and on tangible outputs."22 Similarly in the case of urban Argentina, architect Ruben Gazzoli complains that NGOs monopolize expert knowledge and middleman roles in the same way as traditional political machines.23 Lea Jellinek, a social historian who has spent more than a quartercentury studying the poor in Jakarta, in turn, recounts how one famed NGO, a neighborhood microbank, "beginning as a small grassroots project driven by needs and capacities of local women," grew Frankenstein-like into a "large, complex, top—down, technically oriented bureaucracy" that was "less accountable to and supportive o f " its low-income base.24 From a Middle Eastern perspective, Asef Bayat deplores the hyperbole about NGOs, pointing out that "their potential for independent and democratic organization has generally been overestimated.


pages: 318 words: 85,824

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, debt deflation, declining real wages, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, labour market flexibility, land tenure, late capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Chicago School, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, union organizing, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Winter of Discontent

In retrospect it may seem as if the answer was both inevitable and obvious, but at the time, I think it is fair to say, no one really knew or understood with any certainty what kind of answer would work and how. The capitalist world stumbled towards neoliberalization as the answer through a series of gyrations and chaotic experiments that really only converged as a new orthodoxy with the articulation of what became known as the ‘Washington Consensus’ in the 1990s. By then, both Clinton and Blair could easily have reversed Nixon’s earlier statement and simply said ‘We are all neoliberals now.’ The uneven geographical development of neoliberalism, its frequently partial and lop-sided application from one state and social formation to another, testifies to the tentativeness of neoliberal solutions and the complex ways in which political forces, historical traditions, and existing institutional arrangements all shaped why and how the process of neoliberalization actually occurred.

By the end of the decade most economics departments in the US research universities—and these helped train most of the world’s economists—had fallen into line by broadly cleaving to the neoliberal agenda that emphasized the control of inflation and sound public finance (rather than full employment and social protections) as primary goals of economic policy. All of these strands came together in the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’ of the mid-1990s.5 The US and UK models of neoliberalism were there defined as the answer to global problems. Considerable pressure was put even on Japan and Europe (to say nothing of the rest of the world) to take the neoliberal road. It was, therefore, Clinton and then Blair who, from the centre-left, did the most to consolidate the role of neoliberalism both at home and internationally.

Whether it was all a matter of conscious though adaptive planning (‘groping the stones while crossing the river’ as Deng called it) or the working out, behind the backs of the party politicians, of an inexorable logic deriving from the initial premises of Deng’s market reforms, will doubtless long be debated.2 What can be said with precision, is that China, by not taking the ‘shock therapy’ path of instant privatization later foisted on Russia and central Europe by the IMF, the World Bank, and the ‘Washington Consensus’ in the 1990s, managed to avert the economic disasters that beset those countries. By taking its own peculiar path towards ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ or, as some now prefer to call it, ‘privatization with Chinese characteristics’, it managed to construct a form of state-manipulated market economy that delivered spectacular economic growth (averaging close to 10 per cent a year) and rising standards of living for a significant proportion of the population for more than twenty years.3 But the reforms also led to environmental degradation, social inequality, and eventually something that looks uncomfortably like the reconstitution of capitalist class power.


pages: 378 words: 121,495

The Abandonment of the West by Michael Kimmage

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, classic study, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

Starting in the 1990s, Eisenhower’s good cheer was much easier to come by in Western capitals, easier to maintain and easier to pin to the present moment.5 Clinton, Bush and Obama represented three different kinds of internationalist optimism. Clinton was an economic optimist; Bush, a geopolitical optimist; and Obama, an institutional optimist. Clinton began the “Washington consensus” whereby free trade and the elaboration of economic rules were to be the levers for prosperity and political-economic integration. The Washington consensus built on American advantages in business and technology, summing up the end phase of the Cold War. The Soviet Union had destroyed itself through economic inefficiency and by building mental and physical walls. To lower the barriers of economic and intellectual exchange was to open the world to creativity and, over time, to democracy: Clinton could make good on the economic liberties and the gospel of prosperity that Ronald Reagan had put before his Berlin audience in 1987.

As he had been advised at Camp David right after September 11, removal of the autocrat Saddam Hussein was the necessary next step. The residents of the Middle East would find their way to democracy and economic freedom, and Bush’s freedom agenda was wider even than the Middle East. Obama substituted the liberal international order for the Washington consensus and for wars of choice. Law, institutions, education, charismatic leadership and order were his long game, the lifting of people from poverty and the multilateral cultivation of political dignity and shared decision making. Liberty and self-government were living ideals for these three presidents.

Without doing too much to antagonize Washington, China pursued a foreign policy and an order of its own. Beijing had no reason to concede to the West when it could harness the liberal international order for the sake of aggrandizing China. In Beijing’s assessment, the liberal international order would be eclipsed at some point by an order of Chinese design. Other setbacks for the Washington consensus and the liberal international order were more local. The shifts registered in Europe first. Southern Europe’s economic stagnation sparked anger at alleged German domination of the European Union. In Central Europe, nationalism led some political leaders to defy Brussels and to thumb their noses at the liberal international order.


pages: 221 words: 46,396

The Left Case Against the EU by Costas Lapavitsas

anti-work, antiwork, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, capital controls, central bank independence, collective bargaining, declining real wages, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, hiring and firing, low interest rates, machine translation, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, post-work, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck

Broadly speaking, EU policies were of a piece with the neoliberal approach to developing country crises adopted by the IMF since the early 1980s, which gradually came to constitute the ‘Washington Consensus’ in economic policy. This is a neoliberal totem that has become characteristic of financialized capitalism and broadly advocates financial and labour market deregulation, fiscal austerity, and privatization. Over the years the ‘Washington Consensus’ has given rise to an extensive critical literature owing to its theoretical weaknesses and policy blunders.6 Far from curing the problems of stricken economies, austerity frequently has had a net destructive effect on output, employment, and productive capacity.

‘The Political Economy of the European Economic and Monetary Union: Political Sources of an Economic Liability’, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series No. 6150, available at: http://www.nber.org/papers/w6150.pdf Fine B., C. Lapavitsas, and J. Pincus (eds) 2001. Development Policy in the Twenty-first Century: Beyond the Post-Washington Consensus, London: Routledge. Flassbeck, H. and C. Lapavitsas 2013. ‘The Systemic Crisis of the Euro: True Causes and Effective Therapies’, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Studien, available at: http://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/Studien/Studien_The_systemic_crisis_web.pdf Flassbeck, H. and C.

Index A Africa, migration from 6 asylum seekers see migrant crisis austerity destructive effect of 72 drives recession 80–2 effect of crisis 129 EMU regime of 10 German wages and 47 imposed during crisis 71, 72–3, 91 institutions for 77 left policies and 112 lifting 133 social problems from 129 Austria core of EU 8–9 Germany and 44, 63 authoritarianism Brexit and 139 migrant crisis and 120 right-wing support for 6 rise of 1, 11, 82 see also right politics B Bank of England 24 Banking Union 78 banks and financial institutions bailing-in 79 credit risk of states 75–6 debts shifted to public 73 Eurosystem 33–4 fiscal discipline and 38 Greek expansion of 89 Greek PSI and 95 Hayek on federalism and 15 interest rates 57–8 liquidity 73–5, 78, 91–2 national banks of states 33 neoliberal capitalism and 24 private lenders to periphery 69 quantitative easing 74, 80–1 reversing financialization 135 single currency and 22–3 stress tests 78 ‘sudden stops’ 68, 84 Belgium 26 Big Data 135 Bretton Woods Agreement collapse of 23–4, 27 fixed exchange rates 25–6 Britain financialization and 41 households/individuals 43 insights from Brexit 137–40 migrant crisis and 119 military hegemony 21 withdraws from EMS 30 Bundesbank model for ECB 31 no public debt purchases 74–5 stability of EMS 29 business EU neoliberal agenda 70 multinational corporations 38 self-employed in crisis 73 small and medium in crisis 73 see also industry C capitalism financialization 40–4, 41–4 see also neoliberalism Central/Eastern Europe collapse of communist bloc 2, 44 discredited socialism 8 EU expansion and 2 German FDI in 62–4 German industry and 64, 73 industry in 61–2 movement of workers 6 periphery in EU 9, 59–66 China 134, 136 class relations austerity and the Left 112 in Germany 46 Greek historical bloc 100–4 Marx and Engels on 127–8 neoliberalism against workers 10 perception of powerlessness 4–5 states and 20, 21 workers in EU 127–30 communism discredited 8 Greece’s KKE 106–7 not haunting Europe 127 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels) 127–8 competitiveness Germany’s edge 49–54, 59–9, 81 Greek loss of 85, 96, 97 monetary union and 50–2 in Southern periphery 70–1 conditionality for Greece 91–2 IMF and EU clash 99–100 labour and unions 91 neoliberal policies and 68–9, 76 Conservative Party, Britain 138–9 consumption German households 49 Greece in Eurozone 87 Czech Republic not in Eurozone 62 opening of economy 44 in periphery 9, 59 D debt austerity and 81 bad 80 bond-based in Greece 90 commercial credit 94 domestic credit 89 effects of bail-outs 96–7 Eurozone crisis 50 German lending 58–9 global crisis and 67 Greece restructures 92–3 interest rates 57 interstate lending 76 mutualization and bonds 75–6 no forgiveness 75–6 protecting EU banks 74–5 public and private 55–6, 56–7, 69, 72, 84, 88–90 rise of in Spain 69 Southern periphery 55–8 Delors, Jacques ideological expansion 2 social democracy in EU 7, 8 Delors Report (1989) 30 democracy Democracy in Europe Movement 121–2 EU deficit of 4–5, 113–18, 126–7 EU ideals of 1, 3 in Eurozone crisis 71, 117–18 Greek historical bloc 101–4 judiciary and 116–17 post-Brexit 140 powerless poor 5 against ruling elites 130 Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25) 121–2 Denmark, migrant crisis and 118 E Eastern Europe see Central/Eastern Europe economics ‘depoliticization’ of 3–4 ‘time-inconsistency’ 30–1 see also Eurozone crisis; global economic crisis; neoliberalism Emergency Liquidity Assistance 78 End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama) 2 Engels, Friedrich The Communist Manifesto (with Marx) 127–8 environmental legislation 18 euro/single currency competitiveness of nations 50–2 creation of 18 dismantling 131–3 divisions in Left and 8 dollar exchange rate 86 Exchange Rate Mechanism 28 financialization of economies 37–8 flawed architecture of 33–6 formation of EMS 28 GDP and 54 German edge 49–54, 58–9, 59–66 German monetary hegemony 36–9 Germany as anchor/model 28–30, 98 Greece joins 97–8 Greek determination to remain 101–2 international competition 2–3 long-term interest rates 57–8 Maastricht and 14 Macron and 123 national peculiarities 22 neo-functionalists 32 neoliberal mechanisms of 10–12 neoliberal monetary policies 22–5 regime hardened 81–2 rising debt 55–8 Southern periphery 54–9 SSM and 78–9 Stability and Growth Pact 34, 49 stabilizing exchange rates 26–9 SYRIZA negotiations and 110–12 transnational mechanism of 25 see also Eurozone crisis Eurogroup 72, 132 Working Group 72, 118, 132 European Central Bank (ECB) 31 dismantling the EMU and 132 Eurobonds 75–6 Eurosystem and 33–4 Hayek’s ideas and 25 liquidity 73–5, 78, 91–2, 102 response to SYRIZA 110–12 slow effect of quantitative easing 80–1 see also Troika European Commission creation of 14 democratic deficit 113–14 increased fiscal powers 78 member state power 19 peripheral countries and 50 strength of 2 see also Troika European Court of Justice (ECJ) Brexit and 139 democratic deficit of 116–17 member state power 19 neoliberal ideology 122 rejecting 137 transnational presence 3 European Economic Community (EEC) see European Union (EU) European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) 76 European Monetary System (EMS) 28–30, 31–2 European Monetary Union (EMU) see euro/single currency European Parliament 3 creation of 14 democratic deficit 114–16 member state power 19 European Semester 77 European Stability Mechanism (ESM) 34, 76, 94, 132 European Union (EU) attitude toward Greece 85 bail-outs for Greece 90–8 Brexit and 137–40 Central European expansion 2 clashes with IMF 99–100 class relations within 127–30 Delors and social democracy 7, 8 democratic deficit 113–18 failure in migrant crisis 118–20 Four Freedoms 13, 117, 139–40 hardens regime in crisis 99 Hayek and federalism 14–18 ideological expansion 2 impossibility of radical reform 121–6 instability of 1 integration push 14, 19 legislation 18 Macron and 123–6 neo-functionalists and intergovernmentalists 19–20 neoliberal agenda of 9–12, 70–9, 126–7 not federated 19, 35 perceived as progressive 129–30 peripheries 9, 21 power hierarchies 20 punitive interest rates 84 Social Chapter 7–8 state sovereignty and 79 see also euro/single currency; European Central Bank (ECB); European Commission; Eurozone crisis; Maastricht Treaty European Union Council decisions and democracy of 122 democratic deficit 113 Eurosystem 33–4 bonds and 75 Eurozone crisis attitudes in crisis 84 causes in Greece 83–6 competitiveness gap 81 democratic deficit of 117–18 effect of 129 Eurosystem 34 favours capital 5 Fiscal Compact 34–5 German hegemony 44 German industry and 59–60 Greek bail-outs 93–4 imposed austerity 76–8 policies drive recession 80–2 preventing euro collapse 70 priority of protecting lenders 98–9 public debt 50 sovereignty and 20–1 ‘sudden stops’ 67–70 treaty obligations 34 Excessive Deficit Procedure 77 Exchange Rate Mechanism 28, 30 exchange rates 25–9, 48 Bretton Woods system 25–6 dismantling EMU and 132 in Greek crisis 86, 92 ‘sudden stops’ and 69 F federalism Hayek and 14–18 single currency and 26–7 financial institutions see banks and financial institutions Fiscal Compact 77 foreign direct investment (FDI) 62, 63 Four Freedoms 13, 117, 139–40 France banks protected 73–4 core of EU 8–9 current account pressure 81 FDI in 64–5 financialization and 41 German edge over 60, 61 German neo-mercantilism 55 Germany as ‘anchor’ 29 households/individuals 43 idea of single currency 26 industry in 40 Macron and 122–6 migrant crisis and 119 military hegemony 21 nominal unit labour 51–2 private debt 55 productivity 53 public debt 56–7 push toward euro 31–2 Fukuyama, Francis The End of History 2 G Germany austerity and wages 47 bank-based system 42 banks protected 73–4 benefits in crisis 118 Central European periphery 59–66 competitive edge 49–54, 58–9, 81 crisis solidifies advantage 81–2 defeat of labour 44, 45–9 domestic economy 133 Europe as Deutschmark area 27–8 Eurozone hegemony 21, 31–3, 59–66 exchange rate 48 financialized economy of 40–4 Greek inflation and 86 Hartz Reforms 46–7 hegemony of 8–9, 25, 36–9 households/individuals 42–3 idea of single currency 26 imposes will in crisis 73 individuals/households 49 industrial interests 11 industry 64 infrastructure investment 49 labour and wages 41–2, 43–4, 53, 54 leadership in economic crisis 9 as lender 58–9 Macron’s France and 122–4 migrant crisis and 118–19 monetary ‘anchor’/model 28–30, 98 neo-mercantilism 55 nominal unit labour 51–2 opposes mutualization 75–6 ordoliberalism 45–6 outward FDI 62–4 private debt 55 productivity 53 public debt 56–7 reunification of 2, 32, 43 social democracy evaporates 48 global economic crisis banking collapse and 67 hegemony and hierarchy 3 globalization, effects of 134, 136–7 Greece admission to EU 1–2 agriculture 86–7, 97 banks and bail-outs 97 bond swaps 95 causes of crisis 83–6 civil service and 97 contraction of demand 94 current account deficit 84 default and exit prospect 103, 106, 107 determination to stay in 101–2 domestic credit 89 economy in EU 86–90 effect of Eurozone on 93 EU bail-outs 90–8 failure of SYRIZA 11 financialization and 38 first-bail out 93–4 historical bloc 100–4 industry 86–7, 97 joins Eurozone 97–8 laws on state debt 90, 95 long-term effects of bail-outs 96–8 loss of competitiveness 85 loss of sovereignty 97–8 no debt relief 75–6 no interstate lending 76 nominal unit labour 51–2 private debt 55 productivity 52, 53 prospect of default and exit 99 public debt 56–7, 84 refugee crisis 119–20 restructures debt 92–3 rising debt 69, 81, 87–90 second bail-out 94–5 services 86–7 Southern periphery 9, 54–9 strong growth 88 ‘sudden stop’ 69, 84 SYRIZA surrenders 109–12 SYRIZA’s rise to power 104–5 third bail-out 95–6, 111–12 treaty obligations and 34 Troika’s imposition 71–2 unable to devalue euro 92 unemployment in 80 welfare provision 90 H Hayek, Friedrich 141 federalism 22–3 interstate federalism 14–18 money and state 24–5 Hungary in Central European periphery 9 migrant crisis and 119 not in Eurozone 62 opening of economy 44 in periphery 59–66 I industry Central/Eastern European periphery 61–2 in Eurozone crisis 59–60 German 11, 40, 50, 64 Greek 86–7, 97 Hayek and federalism 16 inequality effect of crisis policies 73 financialization and 43 in Germany 46 left egalitarianism and 129 rising level of 5 tackling 133–4 inflation Eurosystem obligations 33–4 Greece and Germany 86 nominal remuneration 51 infrastructure, public investment 135–6 International Monetary Fund (IMF) clashes with EU on conditionality 99–100 protection of lenders 99 ‘sudden stops’ and 68 Washington Consensus 72 see also Troika investment declines in crisis 80 public 135–6 see also foreign direct investment Ireland credit bubble 89 debt shifted 72 investment in 88 no interstate lending 76 ‘sudden stop’ 69 treaty obligations and 34 Islam, migration crisis and 6 Italy core of EU 8–9 debt 55, 56–7 FDI in 64–5 German edge over 29, 55, 60, 61 industry in 40 nominal unit labour 51–2 productivity 53 K Keynesian economics 45 Mitterrand and 7 SYRIZA and 136 KKE (Communist Party, Greece) 106–7 L labour capital against 5 domestic demand and 133 effect of crisis 73 EU legislation 18 fiscal discipline imposed on 38 in France 125–6 in Germany 21, 41–2, 43–4, 45–9 Greek conditionality and 91 loss of democracy and 118 neoliberalism and 24 new technologies and 134–5 nominal unit 51–2 not an EU priority 70 opposition to capital 22 unemployment 46–7, 80, 96 wages 43, 53, 71, 77 see also class relations; trade unions Labour Party, Britain 139, 140 opposition to joining EEC 7 law, international 4 left politics austerity policies and 110–12 Brexit and Labour 140–1 class relations in EU 127–30 conflicts within Greece 106–8 confronting neoliberalism 131–7 discredited communism 8 dismantling EMU 131–3 EU hostility to SYRIZA 111–12 EU seen as progressive 129 industrial policies 135–6 infrastructure 135–6 insights from Brexit 137–40 lifting austerity 133 opposition to joining EEC 7 public investment 135–6 tackling inequality 133–4 world trade 136–7 Lisbon Treaty, Article 125 34 Luxembourg 63 M Maastricht Treaty class relations and 128 creation of EMU 8 crisis hardens policies of 70 federalism and 14 fiscal criteria 34 Four Freedoms 13 historical context of 14 ideological expansion 2 movement of workers 6 national policies and 116 neoliberal ascendancy 21 ‘no bail-out clause’ 34 principle of subsidiarity 18–19 Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure 77 Macron, Emmanuel programme of 123–6 rise of 122–3 markets, money and 24–5 Marx, Karl The Communist Manifesto (with Engels) 127–8 ‘world money’ 37 media coverage of crisis 102–3 migrant crisis 5–6 Dublin regulations 118–19 moral and political failure 118–20 migration within EU 6 freedom of 13 Mitterrand, François, failure of 7 monetary policies ‘anchor’ country 28–30 Bretton Woods collapse 23–4, 27 fiscal discipline 31 French push to euro 31–2 Quantity Theory of Money 30–1 ‘Snake in the Tunnel’ 27 Sound Money 30–1, 32 in a treaty-based alliance 35 US and 35 see also euro/single currency; exchange rates N Negri, Toni 8 neo-functionalists EMU and 32 supranational bodies 19–20 neoliberalism antipathy to public sector 8 capital against labour 5 conditionality and 68–9, 76 confronting 131–7 defeats SYRIZA 111–12 democracy and EU law 116–17 effect on Greece 85 German hegemony and 9–12 German ordoliberalism 45–6 imposed in Eurozone crisis 70–9 influence in EU 98 after Maastricht 14 toward monetary union 22–5 power in EU relations 72 state institutions and 24 Thatcher/Reagan and 2 Netherlands core of EU 8–9 Germany and 44, 63 idea of single currency 26 O Outright Monetary Transactions 74 P Poland in Central European periphery 9 not in Eurozone 62 opening of economy 44 in periphery 59 Portugal admission to EU 2 economic growth of 88 financialization and 38 in Southern periphery 9 ‘sudden stop’ 69 treaty obligations and 34 poverty not an EU priority 70 unemployment and 80 see also inequality power relations credit money 23 democracy as dangerous 130 EU neoliberalism and 72 among EU states 20 Greek bail-outs and 97–8 hostility from neoliberals 136–7 world money 37 private sector involvement (PSI) 95 privatization, imposition of 71, 77 productivity comparisons 51–2 Greece 87 technological change and 134–5 proportionality principle 18–19 public sector debt shifted to 72 Eurozone crisis and 71 neoliberal antipathy toward 8 PSI and 95 R racism, Brexit and 139 Reagan, Ronald 2 refugees crisis of 5–6 migrant crisis 118–20 regulations Eurozone crisis and 71 imposed deregulation 72 right politics openings for authoritarianism 10 rejecting democracy 6 rights, individual 3 Riksbank, Sweden 24 Rome, Treaty of (1957) 13 Russia EEC and USSR 13–14 S Schröder, Gerhard, labour and 45–6 Securities Market Programme 74 service sector EU freedom of 13 Greece 86–7 Single European Act (1986), ideological expansion 2 Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM), deals with failing banks 78–9 Six Pack 77 Slovakia opening of economy 44 in periphery 9, 59–66 Slovenia opening of economy 44 in periphery 9, 59–66 Smithsonian Agreement (1971) 27 social democrats decline of 9 EU seen as progressive 129–30 evaporates in Germany 48 social policies ‘depoliticization’ of 3–4 EU ideals of 3 EU legislation 18 IMF costs to 91 socialism, collapse of 8 Southern periphery, grouping of 9 see also France; Greece; Portugal; Spain sovereignty Brexit and 139–40 Greek loss of 97–8, 102 harmonization of EU law 116–17 plebeian class view of 130 states in EU 126–7 in treaty-based alliance 79 working-class perceptions 4–5 see also power relations; states Spain admission to EU 1–2 credit bubble 89 debt 56–7, 69, 72, 81 economic growth of 88 investment in 88 nominal unit labour 51–2 private debt 55 productivity 53 in Southern periphery 9, 54–9 unemployment in 80 Stability and Growth Pact hardening of 77 monitors fiscal structures 18 states class relations within 20, 21 competitiveness with EMU 50–2 credit risks of 75–6 euro fiscal discipline 31 monopoly over money 23 responsibility to others 79 sovereignty of 19, 35–6 supranational bodies 19–20 subsidiarity, principle of 18–19 Sweden, migrant crisis and 118 Syria, migration from 6 SYRIZA divisions within 106–8 failure of 11 Keynesianism 136 learning from failure 121, 131 rise to government 104–5 signs third bail-out 102 surrender of 105 T TARGET2 91 taxation avoidance practices 101 Eurozone crisis and 71 Greece increase in 93 Hayek on federalism and 15 immunity in Greece 90 on wealth 134 technology, economic changes and 134–5 Thatcher, Margaret, anti-labour neoliberalism 2 trade Brexit and 139–40 freedom of movement 13 globalization and 134 among member states 132 Hayek on tariffs 15–16 world economy 136–7 trade unions Greek conditionality and 91 weak in Germany 41 see also labour Troika 71 effect on Greece 91–2, 102 imposes neoliberalism 71–9 protection of lenders 98–9 Varoufakis’s negotiations 108–9 Tsipras, Alexis expectations of 105 initial strategy of 107 surrender of 109–12 Turkey, migrant crisis and 119, 120 Two Pack 77 U USA the dollar as world money 37 with EEC against USSR 13–14 financialization and 41 German FDI 63 monetary system 35 USSR 13–14 V Varoufakis, Yanis ‘democratizing’ EU 121 negotiating approach 108–9 sidelined 110 W Werner (Pierre) Report (1970) 26 POLITY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT Go to www.politybooks.com/eula to access Polity’s ebook EULA.


Global Governance and Financial Crises by Meghnad Desai, Yahia Said

Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency peg, deglobalization, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, German hyperinflation, information asymmetry, Japanese asset price bubble, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent-seeking, short selling, special drawing rights, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, transaction costs, Washington Consensus

Meanwhile, it originated its practice of lending into the arrears to countries unable to meet their schedule of debt service with the banks. The IMF: past and future 49 The doctrine of structural adjustment got a strong impetus from the collapse of East European Socialism. It entered the 1990s under the label of “the Washington Consensus.” It fostered the IMF in its role of financial agency for development, which got reconciled with mainstream economics now dedicated to supply side. Financial liberalization reached Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia at an astounding speed. The rest of the story is well known. The disruptions provoked by financial liberalization in countries with weak financial structures and in international markets rigged with self-fulfilling speculation, triggered crises of a magnitude not seen since the Great Depression.

The late financial crises had entailed so huge amount of credits and had shifted the priorities once more in such a way that an overhauling of the Fund’s mandate and a restructuring of its financial capacities are at stake. International LOLR Financial liberalization has not worked the way hoped for by the Washington Consensus. The private sector has indeed entered the financial game on both the debtor and the creditor sides. For emerging markets at least, the IMF no longer has to substitute failing capital markets in bringing resources to developing countries. But the late financial crises have amply shown that capital markets could fail otherwise.

What an effective regionalism may supply, however, is some defence against financial turbulence. Financial crises have become significant once more because of the enormous financial flows which deregulation, floating currencies, and the abolition of exchange controls since the 1970s have unleashed. The new economic orthodoxy, dubbed in the 1980s as the Washington Consensus, has legitimated deregulation and in so doing has undermined national economic policies. Deregulation is now criticised, however, for threatening economic and political stability. The scale of the financial turbulence which has been observed in many countries in recent years, from the countries of Southeast Asia, Russia, Brazil, Argentina and the United States, has raised fears that a global financial crisis might be in the making, which would plunge the world into a major depression.


pages: 481 words: 120,693

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The collapse of communism in the Soviet bloc and the adoption of market economics in communist China ended that ideology’s seventy-year-long intellectual and political challenge to capitalism, leaving the market economy as the only system anyone has come up with that works. That red threat was one reason the plutocrats accepted the Treaty of Detroit, and its even more generous European equivalents. The red surrender emboldened the advocates of the Washington Consensus and helped them to create the international institutions needed to underpin a globalized economy. These three transformations—the technology revolution, globalization, and the rise of the Washington Consensus—have coincided with an age of strong global economic growth, and also with the reemergence of the plutocrats, this time on a global scale. Among students of income inequality, there is a fierce debate about which of the three is the most important driver of the rise of the 1 percent.

Our access to information and technological assistance in going through the mountains of chaff to get to the wheat—no society has ever had that. That is huge.” — This double-barreled economic shift has coincided with an equally consequential social and political one. MIT researchers Frank Levy and Peter Temin describe the transformation as a move from “The Treaty of Detroit” to the “Washington Consensus.” The Treaty of Detroit was the five-year contract agreed to in 1950 by the United Auto Workers and the big three manufacturers. That deal protected the carmakers from annual strikes; in exchange, it gave the workers generous health care coverage and pensions. Levy and Temin use “The Treaty of Detroit” as a shorthand to describe the broader set of political, social, and economic institutions that were established in the United States during the postwar era: strong unions, high taxes, and a high minimum wage.

This was the decade of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They both sharply cut taxes at the top—Reagan slashed the highest marginal tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent and reduced the maximum capital gains tax to 20 percent—reined in trade unions, cut social welfare spending, and deregulated the economy. This Washington Consensus was exported abroad, too. Its greatest impact, and its greatest validation, was in communist regimes. The collapse of communism in the Soviet bloc and the adoption of market economics in communist China ended that ideology’s seventy-year-long intellectual and political challenge to capitalism, leaving the market economy as the only system anyone has come up with that works.


pages: 868 words: 147,152

How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, collective bargaining, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, financial deregulation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, large denomination, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fragmentation, megaproject, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, purchasing power parity, rent control, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TSMC, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, working-age population

(China was omitted from the report.) 2 This was the ideologically charged era of the so-called Washington Consensus, when the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury were united in their determination that the free market policies coming into vogue in the US and Britain were appropriate to all economies, no matter what their level of development.3 The vitriol of the debate was such that academic rigour was frequently a victim, as with the World Bank reports. Indeed, even the academic specialists on Japan, Korea and Taiwan who opposed the Washington Consensus position on economic development made suspect claims in order to bolster their case.

Worse still, as the failings of half-hearted, poorly planned agricultural and manufacturing strategies became apparent from the 1980s, governments were tempted by the siren calls of the incipient Washington Consensus – the free market agenda for economic development that was being pressed on developing countries with increased vigour by the IMF, the World Bank and the US government. The loudest and most evangelical message of these agencies was that deregulating the financial sector could put the development efforts of lagging countries back on track. States were encouraged to privatise existing banks and license new banks, to take a laissez-faire attitude to international flows of capital and to expand stock markets. The argument of the Washington Consensus was that liberated capital would then itself identify the right investments to spur economic progress.

There is no sense in a state getting ahead of this trend. The deregulation process is difficult enough to handle even once a state has developed its bureaucratic capacity. Japan, Korea and Taiwan each experienced financial crises when liberalising. But what was more important was that these states resisted pressure from the Washington Consensus and held off liberalisation until very substantial developmental progress had occurred. The key conduits for maintaining financial control in a developing economy have always been capital controls and banking systems – the latter because they are easier for states with limited bureaucratic capacity to manage than stock or bond markets.


pages: 214 words: 57,614

America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, information security, Internet Archive, John Perry Barlow, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

The Internet was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as a means of communicating after a nuclear attack. 14. Historically, the Washington Consensus developed in response to the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, where heavy foreign borrowing and lack of fiscal discipline led to a pathological cycle of currency crisis, devaluation, expansionary monetary policy to cover fiscal deficits, hyperinflation, and then renewed exchange rate crisis. The economic policy measures outlined in the Washington Consensus were necessary to break this cycle, and through a painful series of adjustments countries like Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina managed, by the early 1990s, to stabilize their macroeconomic balances. 15.

Much of the drive to Americanize the global economy came out of the private sector and the challenge posed by newly competitive U.S. companies and financial institutions. But American government policy was highly supportive of economic liberalization as well, in ways that generated a backlash that often went unperceived in Washington. The Washington Consensus was a package of orthodox economic liberalization measures that were often attached as conditions to structural adjustment lending packages by international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank for developing countries. 14 Had this type of U.S.

Agency for International Development (USAID), 117, 134, 139, 149, 150, 151, 152-53, 2i2n39 Vernet, Daniel, 14 Vietnam War, 18, 121 Villepin, Dominique de, 100 Voice of America, 136, 150 Wall Street Journal, 34 warfare. See military, U.S.; nuclear proliferation; targeting precision Warsaw Pact, 29, 51 Washington Consensus, 109, 205ni4 weapons of mass destruction (WMDs): intelligence failures regarding, 5-6, 87, 90-91; as threat to United States, 46, 66, 79-81, 82, 203ni9 Weber, Max, 125 Weekly Standard, 40, 117 welfare state, 28, 38, 107 Wilson, James Q., 18-19, 115,206m Wilson, Woodrow, 49 Wilsonianism.


pages: 426 words: 83,128

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality by Oded Galor

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, COVID-19, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, income per capita, intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, means of production, out of africa, phenotype, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Scramble for Africa, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Walter Mischel, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey

An effective strategy would grapple instead with these primary factors as they are the ones that have invariably hindered the growth process and they often differ radically from one country to another. One conspicuous example of this misguided approach is the Washington Consensus – a set of policy recommendations for developing countries focused on trade liberalisation, the privatisation of government-owned enterprises, greater protections for property rights, deregulation, broadening the tax base and reducing marginal tax rates. Despite intense efforts by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to implement Washington Consensus–inspired reforms in the 1990s, they have had limited success in producing the desired results.[2] Privatisation of industry, trade liberalisation and secure property rights might be growth-conducive policies for countries that have already developed the social and cultural prerequisites for economic growth, but in environments where these foundations are absent, where social cohesion is tenuous and corruption well entrenched, such universal reforms have often been fruitless.

., ‘Apidima Cave fossils provide earliest evidence of Homo sapiens in Eurasia’, Nature 571, no. 7766 (2019): 500–4. Hassan, Fekri A., ‘Demographic archaeology’, in Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, Academic Press, 1981, pp. 225–79. Hausmann, Ricardo, Dani Rodrik and Andrés Velasco, ‘Growth Diagnostics’, The Washington Consensus Reconsidered: Towards a New Global Governance (2008): 324–55. Hausmann, Ricardo, Lant Pritchett and Dani Rodrik, ‘Growth Accelerations’, Journal of Economic Growth 10, no. 4 (2005): 303–29. Hazan, Moshe, and Binyamin Berdugo, ‘Child Labour, fertility, and Economic Growth’, The Economic Journal 112, no. 482 (2002): 810–28.

Ridley, Matt, ‘The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves’, Brock Education: A Journal of Educational Research and Practice 21, no. 2 (2012). Roberts, Seán, and James Winters, ‘Social Structure and Language Structure: The New Nomothetic Approach’, Psychology of Language and Communication 16, no. 2 (2012): 89–112. Rodrik, Dani, ‘Goodbye Washington Consensus, Hello Washington Confusion? A Review of the World Bank’s Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reform’, Journal of Economic Literature 44, no. 4 (2006): 973–87. Roebroeks, Wil, and Paola Villa, ‘On the earliest evidence for habitual use of fire in Europe’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 13 (2011): 5209–14.


pages: 225 words: 61,388

Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, belling the cat, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Live Aid, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, moral hazard, Multics, Ponzi scheme, rent-seeking, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

During the 1980s bilateral flows also became more concessional in nature and by the early 1990s over 90 per cent were grants. Alongside rising government-to-government transfers (bilateral aid), multilateral institutions continued their aggressive march towards gaining greater importance – both in terms of the volume of aid disbursed and as architects of development policy. By 1989, the Washington Consensus (a standard reform package of economic policy prescriptions, mainly on monetary and fiscal policy for the countries most affected by economic crisis) became the backbone of the development strategy pursued by the Washington DC-based institutions (the IMF, World Bank, and US Treasury Department).

There is more (much more) that needs to be done to undo the ills that have gone before, to rectify what has been an unmitigated disaster, and to get Africa onto a solid economic footing. While international donors and organizations must be commended for shifting the development ideology from the bad economic policies of the 1970s (mainly statist) to the good market policies on the books today (introduced on the back of the Washington Consensus), we need to remind them that without the elimination of aid effective implementation of the new, better, development regime will remain shoddy, ineffectual and even disastrous. Africa’s development impasse demands a new level of consciousness, a greater degree of innovation, and a generous dose of honesty about what works and what does not as far as development is concerned.

Ucer, ‘Sub-Saharan Africa: Growth, Savings and Investment, 1986– 93’, IMF Occasional Paper No. 118, 2005 Hartung, William D. and Frida Berrigan, ‘U.S. Arms Transfers and Security Assistance to Israel: An Arms Trade Resource Center Fact Sheet’, 6 May 2002, at http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/reports/israel050602.html Harvard University, Washington Consensus, at http://www.cid.harvard.edu/cidtrade/issues/washington.html Hjertholm, Peter and Howard White, ‘Foreign Aid in Historical Perspective: Background and Trends’, in Tarp (ed.), Foreign Aid and Development Huntington, Samuel, Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968 Ibisin, David and Jake Lloyd Smith, ‘Tsunami disaster: UN “failing to co-ordinate relief efforts”’, Financial Times, 7 January 2005 IFAD Remittance Forum, ‘Sending Money Home: Worldwide Remittance Flows to Developing Countries’, at http://www.ifad.org/events/remittances/maps/ ING Microfinance Support, ‘A Billion to Gain?


pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

This was avoided by China, which has led to talk of the so-called Beijing Consensus serving as an alternative model for newly marketizing nations. In vogue after the success of China’s growth and the critiques levelled at the Washington Consensus, could the Chinese model be a model for Myanmar as it embarks on a historical opening to the global economy? Of course, there may not even be a consensus about the Beijing Consensus, as the Chinese growth experience cannot be easily modelled. And there are many elements of China’s marketization process that are similar to the Washington version. The Washington Consensus was a model of economic development promulgated during the 1980s and 1990s that stemmed from the IMF and US Treasury, both located in Washington, DC.

The model was premised on privatization and financial and trade liberalization. As a number of developing countries failed to benefit from following these prescriptions, which was seen both in the decade-long recession of the former Soviet Union during the 1990s and in the 1980s Latin American crisis, the Washington Consensus fell out of favour and developing countries sought an alternative. Some turned to China, whose market-oriented reforms proceeded at a more gradual pace and with sequencing of key reforms. For instance, state-owned enterprises were slowly reformed and were not subject to mass privatization until a couple of decades into the reform process.

Although with a different stress, the end result is the same: industrialization supports economic development. That shift to industry could launch Myanmar into the rapid-growth phase experienced by other Asian countries. So, the Beijing Consensus perhaps offers a better set of guidelines for Myanmar than the Washington Consensus as it is derived from the experience of its East Asian neighbours. About 70 per cent of Myanmar’s population are employed in the agriculture and resources sector, which accounts for over half of the country’s economic output. It means that there is a lot of scope to industrialize, which can launch a country into fast growth as it ‘catches up’, as occurred in the East Asian ‘miracle’ economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, which are among the few that have become rich in the post-war period.


pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Elsewhere in the world, free-market philosophies were seemingly contributing to financial instability: most striking was the Asian Crisis of 1997/98 – which hit Thailand, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Hong Kong hard, even as communist China emerged relatively unscathed – and the broader emerging-market upheavals that followed. The phrase ‘Washington Consensus’ – which originally referred to a ten-point plan involving, inter alia, fiscal discipline, tax reform, trade liberalization, open cross-border capital markets, property rights and privatization3 – was reinterpreted pejoratively as a symbol of US ‘neo-liberalism’, leading to huge criticism of the post-war Washington-based institutions that, in earlier decades, had done so much to foster economic stability.

Does the new international club provide a convenient scapegoat for the delivery of unpopular measures at home, as happened with the imposition of austerity measures in Southern European countries during the Eurozone crisis that began in 2010? Does the homogeneity of view associated with club membership – for example, adherence to the Washington Consensus or acceptance of inflation-targeting conventions – undermine otherwise legitimate protests at home? Does the new club limit the powers of domestic government through the growth of, for example, a supranational legal authority? And what happens if the views of the international statesman – and the new club he has now joined – are rejected by the nation he is supposed to represent?

And Germany’s relations with the US temporarily soured when Edward Snowden’s WikiLeaks revealed that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone had been hacked by the US National Security Agency. Presumably, Barack Obama was hastily removed from her speed dial. A third way might simply be a moral equivalent of the Washington Consensus. In this case, behaviours should somehow be judged relative to moral norms established by America’s Founding Fathers and subsequently delivered to the world through the benevolent exercise of American ‘soft power’. Yet the US itself has never offered a vision of moral stability. Notably, it has been unable to show any consistent approach in its foreign policies, especially in the Middle East.


pages: 372 words: 92,477

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

India, when it became independent in 1947, embraced British Fabianism even as it put a torch to British imperialism. In Latin America, despite their citizens’ love-hate relationship with the gringos in el norte, the region’s economies lurched forward two decades ago when most of them embraced “the Washington consensus” (a phrase invented by John Williamson to mean a combination of open markets and prudent economic management). Even in Pudong there is a recognition that, until recently, the Western model represented the gold standard of modernity. Freedom and democracy have been central to that. The rise of the Western state was not just a matter of setting up a competent civil service.

Between 1985 and 2000 Western European governments sold off some $100 billion worth of state assets, including such well-known national champions as Lufthansa, Volkswagen, Renault, Elf, and ENI. “Industrial policy” was reduced to hanging on to a few golden shares in privatized companies. The postcommunist countries embraced the Washington consensus especially heartily. Russia privatized thousands of industrial enterprises. Leszek Balcerowicz, Poland’s finance minister after the fall of communism, declared that Thatcher was his “hero.” In Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso introduced a Thatcher-inspired privatization program that, measured by the value of the assets sold, was twice as big as Britain’s.

In South Korea, for instance, about 80 percent of what you get out of the system is tied to what you put in.15 In Asia as a whole, public-health spending is still only 2.5 percent of GDP, compared with about 7 percent in the OECD group of rich nations. The second reason is the crisis of the Western model of democracy and free-market capitalism. In the 1990s Lee’s lectures on Asian values seemed somewhat eccentric, even to Asians. The Washington consensus was sweeping all before it. Francis Fukuyama talked about “the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.”16 Rather than associating Deng Xiaoping’s China with economic greatness, Americans thought of the lone student walking toward the tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989.


pages: 324 words: 90,253

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

The near-term losses in Asia were, in many cases, far bigger than those seen in the West following its later financial crisis but, having been written off as hotbeds of crony capitalism and, thus, doomed to fail, Asian economies were able to bounce back in style. There was no Western-style economic stagnation but, instead, a return to economic dynamism within just a handful of years. Yet the political response varied from nation to nation. In the early 1990s, Asian nations had increasingly adopted the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’, broadly speaking a commitment to low inflation, conservative fiscal policies and open cross-border capital markets. For a while, the policies seemed to work: Thailand, Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia all enjoyed rapid income gains thanks partly to heavy inflows of foreign financial investment.

Others followed suit: Indonesia down over 13 per cent, Malaysia down more than 7 per cent and Korea down almost 6 per cent. As this financial and economic tsunami took hold, it seemed as though the Asian miracle was now over. Then came the fallout and finger-pointing. Western policy-makers, unable to believe there was anything wrong with the Washington Consensus, laid the blame fairly and squarely on the frailties of the Asian economic model. US Federal Reserve Governor Roger Ferguson offered the following – in hindsight, remarkable – musings on the subject at hand in a speech given in March 1998: One of the most important elements … has been the weakness of the banking sector in most of these countries.

As a result, the economy slowly rebalanced away from growth led by domestic demand towards export-led growth (a polite way of saying that Malaysian workers saw the fruits of their labours heading abroad rather than staying at home). And although the economy collapsed in 1998, it thereafter delivered year after year of rapid economic expansion, having adjusted to the new global economic reality. Mahathir was also, however, quick to turn economic convention on its head. The Washington Consensus demanded that countries should open their capital markets to international investors. Mahathir argued that this policy had contributed to the crisis. On 1 September 1998, Bank Negara – the Malaysian central bank – released a statement announcing the imposition of capital controls, giving those holding ringgit offshore a month to bring their money back home.


pages: 252 words: 13,581

Cape Town After Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City by Tony Roshan Samara

conceptual framework, deglobalization, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, illegal immigration, late capitalism, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, structural adjustment programs, unemployed young men, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, working poor

McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 25.╯Walden Bello, “The Post-Washington Consensus: The Unraveling of a Doctrine of Development” (Focus on the Global South, October 18, 2008). http://focusweb.org/the-post-washington-dissensus.html?Itemid51 (accessed 200╇ ·â•‡ Notes to introduction November 11, 2010). See also Pedro-Palo Kuczynski and John Williamson, eds., After the Washington Consensus: Restarting Growth and Reform in Latin America (Washington, D.C.: Petersen Institute, 2003). 26.╯Mark Purcell, Empowering Democracy: Neoliberalization and the Struggle for Alternative Urban Futures (New York: Routledge, 2008); Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2007); Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology and Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007); McDonald, World City Syndrome; Helga Leinter, Jamie Peck, and Eric S.

In the year following the 9/11 attacks and preceding the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in August 2002, political and economic elites from British prime minister Tony Blair to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and World Bank head James Wolfensohn went so far as to draw attention to the relationships among poverty, terrorism, and global security, arguing that underdevelopment was in fact a security issue.15 In March of that year, reformed neoliberal crusader Jeffery Sachs observed: “The extreme poverty of the bottom billion is shocking, morally intolerable and dangerous—a breeding ground of disease, terrorism and violence.”16 Growing unease about the instability that underdevelopment generates suggests that the narrower definition of security has not passed quietly into history along with the Cold War. Rather, the global development agenda of the now post–Washington Consensus continues to be constrained by and articulated through the national security interests of powerful states and transnational interests of global capital. The “pragmatic” agenda of global governance that has resulted is what Canadian political scientist Robert Cox calls global poor relief and riot control, in which the production of security means attempts “to prevent the way in which societies have been evolving through globalisation from destabilising the central structures of globalisation.”17 The merging of security and development agendas under conditions of globalization leads to a knitting together of international bodies—from the UN to aid organizations, military establishments, NGOs, private security companies, and multinational corporations—into transnational networks of global governance administered primarily from the global North.18 According to Peter Wilkin, these governance networks are not geared toward the amelioration of social crisis, but rather are structures assembled for “containment and quarantine of the effects of global poverty, . . . for protecting states from the world’s most impoverished people.”19 Despite the celebration with which many of today’s proponents 10 ╇ ·â•‡ Introduction of globalization greeted the end of the Cold War, a decidedly pessimistic core exists at the center of new elite approaches to security and development.

Neoliberal principles of economic reform originally came to prominence through their application at the national level in the global South. Although change was already afoot in the nations and cities of the global North as well, it was the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the 1980s and 1990s, and the intimately related prescriptions of the Washington Consensus, that first drew attention and notoriety to the ascent of neoliberalism as a global governance force.22 The requirements for installing this new governance regime were substantial, and their implementation often Introduction╇ ·â•‡ 11 necessitated significant restructuring of the state and the strict management of often intense political resistance to all or part of the project.


pages: 823 words: 206,070

The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, book value, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, continuous integration, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, dark matter, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, guest worker program, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, oil shock, precariat, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, vertical integration, very high income, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The countries were Brazil, Chile, China, the Czech Republic, Hong King, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Russia, Singapore, and Thailand. 63 Christopher Rude, “The Role of Financial Discipline in Imperial Strategy,” Socialist Register 2005, London: Merlin, 2004, esp. pp. 90–1. 64 See Porter, Globalization and Finance, p. 64; and Bank of International Settlements, “Strengthening Banking Supervision Worldwide,” p. 4. 65 For a comprehensive analysis of the “new monetary policy consensus” that gave rise to the push for central bank independence and inflation-targeting regimes in developing countries, see the independent report for the UNDP by Alfredo Saad Filho, “Pro-Poor Monetary and Anti-Inflation Policies: Developing Alternatives to the New Monetary Policy Consensus,” Centre for Development Policy and Research Discussion Paper 2405, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 2005. 66 Volcker and Gyohten, Changing Fortunes, p. 181. 67 Baker, Group of Seven, p. 79. 68 For an earlier discussion of this in the context of a critique of Robert Cox’s “outside-in” approach to the shift in the hierarchy of state apparatuses, see Panitch, “Globalization and the State.” 69 See John Williamson, “Did the Washington Consensus Fail?,” speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, November 6, 2002; and “A Short History of the Washington Consensus,” paper presented to the conference on From the Washington Consensus to a New Global Governance, Fundacion CIDOB, Barcelona, September 24–25, 2004, p. 7. 70 Devesh Kapur, John P. Lewis, and Richard Webb, The World Bank: Its First Half Century, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997, p. 510. 71 Frieden, Banking on the World, p. 65. 72 Harold James, “From Grandmotherliness to Governance: The Evolution of IMF Conditionality,” Finance and Development, December 1998, p. 45. 73 Sarah.

The wide international range of US firms, as well as the relative size and importance of US markets, gave American state authorities “tremendous leverage in pressuring foreign firms and regulatory authorities” to adopt these rules and practices.1 But the inherent limits on the extraterritorial application of US law in a world of formally sovereign states also gave rise to extensive coordination of national regulations through international institutions like the newly created WTO, the World Bank, the Bank of International Settlements, and the IMF. The embrace of “structural adjustment” by so many states often depended on their desperation for emergency funds on the conditional terms of the “Washington Consensus.” Yet it was not amiss of James Boughton to point out that what was “included in that rubric was similar to the indigenous revolution or evolution in thinking in developed and developing countries” on the part of state elites as well as capitalist classes around the world.2 As we shall see, the interplay between “global norm making and national lawmaking” at the end of the twentieth century confirmed the extent to which the “spread of an international legal order with capitalism” still meant that “the power dynamics of political imperialism are embedded within the very juridical equality of sovereignty.”3 The Laws of Free Trade A key determinant of the realization of global capitalism at the end of the twentieth century was the capacity of the American state to maintain the postwar trajectory towards the liberalization of trade laws.

What it did mean was that the latter were increasingly likely to restructure themselves so that their representation of non-financial interests would be more attuned to making demands and policy proposals that conformed to the exigencies of fiscal and monetary discipline.68 This sort of discipline figured at the very top of the set of policies that John Williamson was referring to when he famously coined the term “Washington Consensus” in 1989 to capture the neoliberal interface between the US Treasury and Federal Reserve, on the one hand, and the IMF and World Bank on the other.69 And central bank independence became the institutional change that, more than any other, signaled a state’s readiness to embrace the “structural adjustment” required to ensure that this discipline was enforced against democratic pressures for social expenditure.


pages: 234 words: 63,149

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer

airport security, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, clean water, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, Parag Khanna, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, trade route, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

.* Then there is the International House of Pancakes, a chain of more than fifteen hundred restaurants whose global presence amounts to seventeen restaurants in Canada, twelve in Mexico, and two in Guatemala.9 Like IHOP and baseball’s Fall Classic, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, both headquartered in Washington, D.C., clearly bear the “made in America” label. Some critics charge that by conditioning financial support to needy countries on adoption of democratic, free-market reforms—an agenda dubbed the “Washington Consensus”—these institutions exist mainly as tools of U.S. foreign policy.10 That’s a caricature, but beyond the succession of Western leaders who have run these organizations, no one can deny that the U.S. and European governments retain formal and informal powers within them that no longer reflect the size of their contribution to the global economy’s strength.

Japan’s rise also made clear once and for all that nothing barred ancient Eastern cultures from embracing Western capitalist values. As Japan grew stronger, many Americans began to view its rise as a threat to American hegemony. Yet unlike today’s China, Japan’s competitive edge flowed from a political and economic system in relative harmony with the Washington Consensus. By the 1970s, Western Europe and Japan were breaking free of postwar U.S. dominance, but political and economic values helped align their national interests. In 1975, the United States, Japan, Britain, West Germany, France, and Italy formed the G6 group of industrialized nations. A year later, Canada made it a G7.

China has earned a lot of friends within cash-hungry governments in both the established and the emerging worlds, but it has little chance of capturing the hearts and minds of the people who live in these countries. The United States would also lack some of its advantages of the last century. Without the kind of unity imposed by the aftermath of World War II, there will not be a new Bretton Woods to align countries’ economic policies, no Washington Consensus that gives the United States global institutional dominance, no hunger in the rest of the world for U.S. exports or investment, and nothing like the ideological appeal that came from the thirst for democracy after years of fascist dictatorship or fear of a Soviet advance. To be sure, Cold War 2.0 is more likely to emerge than either the G2 or concert scenarios, but many factors limit the risk of a direct and destabilizing U.S.


pages: 535 words: 158,863

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making by David Rothkopf

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, carried interest, clean water, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, fake news, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global village, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Elkington, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Skype, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, William Langewiesche

For example, the financial community’s agenda for the IMF almost unquestioningly embraces policies of fiscal discipline with inadequate attention to social issues, even those that are directly linked to political sustainability of vital reforms in developing countries. It’s not that the core idea was wrong; it is that the balance was off. The same can be said of the Washington Consensus. The Washington Consensus is full of merit, yet its reforms were not sufficiently broad or balanced in scope. It did not focus enough on creating the new stakeholders of globalization by enabling the poor to accumulate and develop assets more rapidly, nor did it prioritize giving them the training and the access to capital they would need to do so—and thus it sowed the seeds of inequity in places like Chile and Brazil and the populist revivals that have occurred throughout Latin America and in Russia.

After traveling around the world promoting market doctrine, he had been out-free-marketed. The lessons of the Chicago boys were so well learned, in fact, that they became practically a religion. Although Chile is a mostly Catholic nation, it could also be said to be one that worships at the altar of the “Washington Consensus,” the prescription of market-oriented reforms that became the primary intellectual product offered by the IMF, the World Bank, and other mainstream international financial institutions during the 1990s. The term was coined by John Williamson of Washington’s Institute for International Economics in a 1989 paper in which he described how old and generally discredited development ideas that had resulted in, among other things, the regional debt crisis of the ’80s, had been overtaken by what he described as a list of “ten policies that I thought more or less everyone in Washington would agree were needed more or less everywhere in Latin America.”

Their interests actually grew less and less aligned with those of their workers and more tied to those of the investment bankers and others who could offer them big paydays or accelerated growth (read: wealth creation) for their companies. This was possible largely because the term “free market”—a bumper sticker description of the complex ideas described among those of Williamson’s Washington consensus—is typically a misnomer. There are always rules: those set by governments, like tax structures and incentives, often tuned to promote the development interests successfully promoted by segments of the business community; and those inherent to markets, like the fact that cost efficiency favors the creation of entities of scale, and compensation structures for bankers favor doing fewer big deals for big companies (which also typically have better credit profiles) rather than many for smaller companies or for individuals.


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

The result was the “lost decade” of the 1980s, in which Latin America became, in the words of former Venezuelan trade minister Moisés Naím, “Atlantis—the lost continent.”10 Crisis followed crisis. To make matters worse, the IMF responded to the United States “like thunder to lightning,” forcing Latin American regimes to tighten their belts as prescribed by the “Washington Consensus” orthodoxy of rapid liberalization, an international variant of trickle-down economics.11 Over a century after the Pan-American Union effort, the heated debate over how to meet Latin Americans’ rising expectations despite unequal American trade continues in the form of a proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) stretching from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.

But the United States must then convince Latin American leaders that China is not an alternative to American leadership but rather its complement. To date, however, America’s hot-and-cold style of diplomacy, careening between the extremes of absent and overbearing, has contributed to the rise of leftist leaders since the 1990s who respond to American encroachment with the rhetoric of cultural resistance, loudly bucking the Washington Consensus and the pleas to democratize. Even in so perfunctory a body as the Organization of American States (OAS), whose charter vainly emphasizes “respect for individual personalities,” America has been unable to introduce a peer-review mechanism anywhere near as sophisticated as Eastern Europe’s intra–second world levers.

Such companies are happy to sign joint production agreements through “mixed companies” with murky standards, even if they have to pay a higher windfall tax—which Chávez uses to ratchet up pressure on European oil companies already operating in Venezuela. Since America has already thrown in its hand, will Europe play its cards to rein in Chávez? Between China and Chávez, Venezuela might still achieve a lasting contribution to both the spirit and practice of Latin American cooperation, one based on a post–Washington Consensus model of mutual aid and indigenous institutions. But history may also ultimately repeat itself in Venezuela, with surging oil prices and Chinese demand allowing Chávez to rely on energy exports and ignore other industries, leaving the economy vulnerable to price fluctuations. The country now resembles Iran prior to the overthrow of the Shah: oil wealth, inequality, and disenfranchisement, a classic prerevolutionary situation.


Rogue States by Noam Chomsky

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edward Snowden, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, land reform, liberation theology, Mahbub ul Haq, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, oil shock, precautionary principle, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, union organizing, Washington Consensus

A week later, farmers blockaded a highway near the capital city of La Paz to protest the eradication of coca leaf, the only mode of survival left to them under the “reforms,” as actually implemented. Reporting on the protests over water prices and the eradication programs, the Financial Times observes that “the World Bank and the IMF saw Bolivia as something of a model,” one of the great success stories of the “Washington consensus,” but the April protests reveal that “the success of eradication programs in Peru and Bolivia has carried a high social cost.” The journal quotes a European diplomat in Bolivia who says that “until a couple of weeks ago, Bolivia was regarded as a success story”—by those who “regard” a country while disregarding its people.

The high-minded rhetoric at and about the Vienna conference was not besmirched by inquiry into the observance of the UD by its leading defenders.25 These matters were, however, raised in Vienna in a Public Hearing organized by NGOs. The contributions by activists, scholars, lawyers, and others from many countries reviewed “alarming evidence of massive human rights violations in every part of the world as a result of the policies of the international financial institutions,” the “Washington Consensus” among the leaders of the free world. This “neoliberal” consensus disguises what might be called “really existing free market doctrine”: market discipline is of great benefit to the weak and defenseless, though the rich and powerful must shelter under the wings of the nanny state. They must also be allowed to persist in “the sustained assault on [free trade] principle” that is deplored in a scholarly review of the post-1970 (“neoliberal”) period by GATT secretariat economist Patrick Low (now director of economic research for the World Trade Organization), who estimates the restrictive effects of Reaganite measures at about three times those of other leading industrial countries, as they “presided over the greatest swing toward protectionism since the 1930s,” shifting the US from “being the world’s champion of multilateral free trade to one of its leading challengers,” the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations commented in a review of the decade.26 It should be added that such analyses omit the major forms of market interference for the benefit of the rich: the transfer of public funds to advanced industry that underlies virtually every dynamic sector of the US economy, often under the guise of “defense.”

The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions reports that “unions are being repressed across the world in more countries than ever before,” while “poverty and inequality have increased in the developing countries, which globalization has drawn into a downward spiral of ever-lower labor standards to attract investment and meet the demands of enterprises seeking a fast profit” as governments “bow to pressure from the financial markets rather than from their own electorates,” in accord with the “Washington consensus.”60 These are not the consequences of “economic laws” or what “the free market has decided, in its infinite but mysterious wisdom,”61 as commonly alleged. Rather, they are the results of deliberate policy choices under really existing free market doctrine, undertaken during a period of “capital’s clear subjugation of labor,” in the words of the business press.62 Contempt for the socioeconomic provisions of the UD is so deeply engrained that no departure from objectivity is sensed when a front-page story lauds Britain’s incoming Labor government for shifting the tax burden from “large businesses” to working people and the “middle class,” steps that “set Britain further apart from countries like Germany and France that are still struggling with pugnacious unions, restrictive investment climates, and expensive welfare benefits.”63 Industrial “countries” never struggle with starving children, huge profits, or rapid increases in CEO pay (under Thatcher, double that of second-place US);64 a reasonable stand under the “general tacit agreement” that the “country” equals “large businesses,” along with doctrinal conventions about the health of the economy—the latter a technical concept, only weakly correlated with the health of the population (economic, social, or even medical).


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendshoring, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

“Income inequality has worsened significantly in some EMEs and, probably more importantly, this deterioration is positively correlated with globalization,” authors Yavuz Arslan, Juan Contreras, Nikhil Patel and Chang Shu wrote in “How Has Globalization Affected Emerging Market Economies?”—a paper published by the Bank for International Settlements.8 Some fingers point at the so-called Washington Consensus, a doctrine from the late 1980s that had the support of the IMF, the World Bank, and the US Treasury Department (all based in Washington) as a recipe for emerging markets in Latin America. Success hinged on easing capital restraints and import restrictions, privatizing state-owned businesses, liberalizing local economies, and enforcing fiscal discipline and monetary policy aimed at low inflation.

A 2013 poll commissioned by King’s College London asked more than six thousand people worldwide the same question: “Which country or countries, if any, do you think have the right ideas about the economy and jobs that your country’s leaders should copy?”9 The United States won handily. “More than a third of Brazilians… and over two fifths of Indians and Mexicans said their countries should copy the US,” the Financial Times reported. “Many South Koreans and South Africans think similarly.” But the policies of the Washington Consensus didn’t work out neatly in practice. Unfettered capital mobility caused dizzying economic and financial boom-and-bust cycles. In good times money flowed into the EMEs. In bumpy times it flowed out, and severe financial crises and recessions erupted. Globalization is a mixed blessing at best.

There were frictions over human rights and intellectual property rights, but none looked insurmountable compared to the potential for commercial gain. The United States and China entered the twenty-first century still far from rivals. Democratic free markets generated unmatched wealth. Developing nations with the notable exception of China signed on to the Washington Consensus, a term for macroeconomic policy that emulates American-style free markets and governance. Then the West stumbled into a global financial crisis. Western institutions looked weak and vulnerable while their political systems became increasingly polarized and partisan. Real estate prices collapsed.


pages: 192

Kicking Awaythe Ladder by Ha-Joon Chang

Asian financial crisis, business cycle, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, fear of failure, income inequality, income per capita, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, land bank, land reform, liberal world order, moral hazard, open economy, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, scientific management, short selling, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus

Introduction There is currently great pressure on developing countries from the developed world, and the international development policy establishment that it controls, to adopt a set of 'good policies' and 'good institutions' to foster their economic development.1 According to this agenda, 'good policies' are broadly those prescribed by the so-called Washington Consensus. They include restrictive macroeconomic policy, liberalization of international trade and investment, privatization and deregulation.2 The 'good institutions' are essentially those that are to be found in developed countries, especially the Anglo-American onesl The key institutions include: democracy; 'good' bureaucracy; an independent judiciary; strongly protected private property rights (including intellectual property rights); and transparent and market-oriented corporate governance and financial institutions (including a politically independent central bank).

Also, as will become clearer further on, the few references to these historical experiences tend to be full of myths that support the orthodox version of the history of economic policy in the NDCs, which emphasize the benefits of free trade and laissez-faire industrial policy. The story, which underlies virtually all recommendations for "Washington Consensus-type policies, goes something like the following.1 From the eighteenth century onward, the industrial success of laissezfaire Britain proved the superiority of free-market and free-trade policies. Through such policies, which unleashed the entrepreneurial energy of the nation, it overtook interventionist France, its main competitor at the time, establishing itself as the supreme world economic power.

In this context, there were really only nine developing countries where there was a growth acceleration that can in theory be attributed to a shift to 'good policies'. Of course, even then, we should not forget that improved performance in the two biggest of these nine economies, that is, China (from 2.7 per cent p.a. to 8.2 per cent p.a.) and India (from 0.7 per cent p.a. to 3.7 per cent p.a.) cannot be attributed to 'good policies' as defined by the Washington Consensus. 8. Stiglitz 2001b. In the ascending order in terms of growth rate (or rather the rate of contraction, in all cases but Poland), they are Georgia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Ukraine, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Belarus, Estonia, Albania, Romania, Uzbekistan, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland. 9.


pages: 561 words: 87,892

Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, old age dependency ratio, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, statistical model, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Levy and Temin argue that the primary reason behind the shift in income distribution is the demise of institutions created during the Great Depression that were designed to spread the benefits of prosperity more widely. These included unions, centralized bargaining frameworks for businesses, workers and government and a protected minimum wage, all of which were dismantled as the economic failures of the 1970s gave way to the laissez-faire Washington Consensus of the 1980s and beyond. Perhaps not surprisingly, others have disputed these claims. For example, Stephen N. Kaplan and Joshua Rauh suggest that institutional arrangements played only a minor role in the huge income gains for those in the top echelons of the earnings spectrum.7 They also dismiss so-called trade-based theories, which argue that higher incomes accrue to those who can exploit comparative advantage while lower incomes come to those in the wrong industries at the wrong time (‘it seems difficult for trade [theories] to explain the increase in the top end of venture capital investors, private equity investors and, particularly, lawyers and professional athletes’).

Now it is the world’s biggest consumer of metals and the second-biggest consumer of oil, other countries have a strong incentive to strike bilateral deals with this new economic behemoth, an economy that finds itself at the epicentre of expanding emerging-market-to-emerging-market trade. Fourth, even if China did nothing to promote the renminbi as an alternative to the dollar as a reserve currency, the renminbi’s status could be elevated by default, merely as a result of growing disenchantment with the dollar. Fifth, many countries that tried but failed with the so-called Washington Consensus might now be content to build economic relationships with a country that at least offers an alternative to US economic hegemony.9 Sixth, and politically most interesting, China is now actively promoting the renminbi’s role as an alternative reserve currency to the dollar. Admittedly, it’s still early days.

See http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010916-2.html. 6. Argentina fell into this trap: it devalued and defaulted to its foreign creditors in 2001. 7. At the time of writing, Google was attempting to do exactly that. 8. Source: Office of the Russian Prime Minister. 9. The Washington Consensus was a view driven by the idea that ‘the market knows best’ and was often imposed by the IMF and others on unsuspecting economies that simply couldn’t cope with liberalized markets and small government. Most obviously, it demanded aggressive fiscal consolidation. Funnily enough, this particular stricture has now been forgotten in the light of the huge increases in budget deficits which followed the 2007/8 credit crunch. 10.


pages: 414 words: 119,116

The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World by Michael Marmot

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, cakes and ale, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Doha Development Round, epigenetics, financial independence, future of work, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Kenneth Rogoff, Kibera, labour market flexibility, longitudinal study, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, New Urbanism, obamacare, paradox of thrift, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, structural adjustment programs, the built environment, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, twin studies, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working poor

The HDR for 2013 expands the insights of Drèze and Sen and identifies what it calls: unwelcome types of growth: jobless growth, which does not increase employment opportunities; ruthless growth, which is accompanied by rising inequality; voiceless growth, which denies the participation of the most vulnerable communities; rootless growth, which uses inappropriate models transplanted from elsewhere; and futureless growth, which is based on unbridled exploitation of environmental resources.17 The HDR contrasts the Washington Consensus, which argues for getting the economic fundamentals right, with UNDP’s own approach, which puts human development first. I love it. Of course I do. This UN agency says that improvement in poor people’s lives – and hence, their health – cannot be postponed while the economic fundamentals start to work. It is actually stronger than that. The Washington Consensus, neoliberalism by another name, is likely to make inequalities wider in addition to neglecting the need to build people’s capabilities and ensure their meaningful freedoms.

The second was a ‘resounding failure to harness the constructive role of the state for growth and development’.10 It could not be clearer: both markets and state institutions are vital. The critique of neoliberalism is correct. The idea that unbridled free markets in everything (the so-called Washington Consensus) is the way for countries to grow, develop and ensure better health and greater health equity is contradicted by the evidence. Equally, market dynamism is a route to greater productivity and economic growth. The question should no longer be capitalism or not, but what kind of capitalistic society do we want to have.

In light of the experience in Europe with austerity we, the governance commission, went back to an older literature to look at the effect of IMF policies of structural adjustment in low-income countries. It does not make happy reading. In the 1980s the IMF made loans contingent on governments accepting IMF recommendations on how to manage the economy. It was mainstream Washington consensus: reduce public spending, markets as the default option for public services, economic deregulation, privatise public assets. We concluded: the effects of these programmes have been disastrous for public health . . . structural adjustment programmes undermined the health of poor people in sub-Saharan Africa through effects on employment, incomes, prices, public expenditure, taxation, and access to credit, which in turn translated into negative health outcomes through effects on food security, nutrition, living and working environments, access to health services, education.13 When discussing the battle between austerians and Keynesians I said that a key criterion should be impact on the lives people are able to lead.


pages: 499 words: 152,156

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos

conceptual framework, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, East Village, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, financial independence, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, land reform, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, Mohammed Bouazizi, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, rolodex, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, young professional

He published The China Miracle, a book coauthored with Fang Cai and Zhou Li that zeroed in on the disarray produced by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and concluded, “The more radical the reform, the more violent will be the destructive social conflicts, and opposition to reform.” Lin promoted China’s “tinkering gradualist approach.” In a lecture at Cambridge University in the fall of 2007, he pointed to “the failure of the Washington Consensus reforms.” He joked that the shock therapy policies ordained by the IMF seemed more like “shock without therapy,” and were destined to lead to “economic chaos.” He reminded people that the proponents of the Washington Consensus had warned that China’s slow-reform approach would be, in his words, “the worst possible transition strategy,” doomed to “result in unavoidable economic collapse.” He had become China’s most prominent evangelist for its own story of prosperity.

As an economic strategy, the approach put China at odds with the dominant economists in the West who recommended that the collapsing Soviet bloc undertake “shock therapy”: cut spending, privatize state-owned companies, and open borders to foreign trade and investment, a recipe that became known as the Washington Consensus. In 1994, in a small office borrowed from the geography department at Peking University, Lin and four other economists founded the China Center for Economic Research, a think tank designed to attract foreign-trained Chinese scholars. He worked like a man possessed, often hunched over his desk until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., and back the next morning by 8:00.

When World Bank officials visited Beijing to celebrate thirty years since China resumed its Bank membership, Zoellick praised China’s reductions in poverty and said, “We, and the world, have much to learn from this.” At the Bank, Lin churned out a series of papers intended to “revisit” the understanding of how poor countries get rich, much if it anathema to the Washington Consensus that prevailed in the 1990s. Writing with the Cameroonian economist Célestin Monga, he argued that governments must “regain center stage.” Industrial policy, in which governments seek to support certain sectors, known to critics as “picking winners,” has a bad name in the West, he said, and for good reason: it has failed far more often than it has succeeded.


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

On the other hand, see Nordhaus (2015) for an economically based criticism of some of the pope’s views on how to deal with global warming. Influenced by the new economic thinking, several governments moved in the previously reported, more pro-market direction, especially in the 1990s, when a related movement, called “Washington Consensus,” mainly directed at developing countries, acquired some influence. Perhaps stretching a little, the Washington Consensus could be considered a stepchild of the supply-side revolution because it also stressed the importance of the supply side of the economy and of the market. That thinking influenced also developments then underway in the economies of countries that were 82 Termites of the State moving from central planning to markets, especially in Eastern Europe (see Tanzi, 2010a).

Fiscal illusions are often easier to create with regulations than with taxes and spending. It can be concluded that, as the twentieth century came to an end, by and large, market forces had been allowed to play a larger role, in many, though not all, of the advanced countries, especially during the last decade of that century, the period of the Washington Consensus and of market fundamentalism, than they had played in earlier decades, in spite of the higher levels of taxes and of public spending in most countries, and in spite of various structural obstacles that continued to exist in the markets of many countries. At the same time the redistributive role that governments had played in the decades immediately after World War II was being reduced, in response to efficiency and incentive concerns that had led to important policy changes, especially in tax policy but also in spending policies such as the welfare reform of 1996 in the United States.

The pro-market thinking attracted not only academic economists but also influential policymakers, including, prominently, Alan Greenspan, who, at that time, was the powerful head of the Federal Reserve system, as well as some members of the Clinton administration, including to some extent Robert Rubin and Larry Summers (see Greenspan, 2004; Rubin and Weisberg, 2003). During the second Bush administration, that thinking would influence the heads of regulatory commissions, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and others. It had generated the pro-market policies associated with the Washington Consensus. After twelve years of Republican administrations, the new Democratic president, Clinton, could declare that the “time of big government was over” and could get set to reform some welfare programs, reduce regulations, especially in the financial sector, and reduce some taxes by enacting more tax expenditures.


pages: 424 words: 119,679

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Starting with the same geography, resources, and people, the one using central control became an indigent nightmare, while the one letting the market decide eliminated poverty and achieved the world’s highest rate of postsecondary education. Gill further notes most developing nations that have followed the “Washington Consensus” policy prescription have raised living standards, increased education levels for girls and women, and held free elections, while most developing nations that cling to central economic control remain impoverished, backward, and under the thumbs of thugs and despots. Put together in the 1980s by an international team of economists, the Washington Consensus recommends that developing nations switch to free economies without central control, avoid debt, deregulate, create enforceable private property rights, liberalize trade going out and capital coming in, and have low marginal tax rates that they actually implement.

Put together in the 1980s by an international team of economists, the Washington Consensus recommends that developing nations switch to free economies without central control, avoid debt, deregulate, create enforceable private property rights, liberalize trade going out and capital coming in, and have low marginal tax rates that they actually implement. (Troubled nations such as Greece post high tax rates, then allow the affluent to bribe their way out of taxes.) Some analysts scorn the Washington Consensus, which stands as the reverse of the prescription of absolute central planning—ministries and subsidies as far as the eye can see. That market-oriented economics usually (of course not always) helps the poor, while central planning usually harms the poor, does seem to settle the matter. Nobody-in-control economics improves living standards for almost everyone while encouraging social progress, since even Fortune 500 types observe that shaking up the system is good.

., on, 67 coal mining and, 61, 76–77, 233 collapse anxiety and, 68 communism and, 174 comparative advantage and, 79–80 control and, 65–66 currency and, 69 democracy and, 167–168, 170, 173–174, 193 Dodd-Frank Act and, 92–93 education and, 169 fascism and, 66 Feldstein on, 91 globalization and, 82 golden age of, 69–70 Great Recession and, 64, 68, 97 inequality and, 84–85 inflation and, 87 infrastructure and, 93–95 Keynes on, 98–99 marriage and, 267, 268 media negativity and, 77, 79, 87–88 modern monetary theory and, 96 Panasonic and, 68–69 paper mills and, 78–79 Piketty on, 84–85 predictions and, 64 pretax income and, 84–85, 91 regulations of, 92–93 retirement economics, 31, 273–274 slow growth and, 90–92 Soviet and American, 167 state pension accounts and, 97–98 trade boosting, 79, 245–246 Trump and, 70–71 US domestic production and, 77–78 US GDP and, 84, 90–91 war and, 93, 132–134 Washington Consensus and, 66–67 Western living standards and, 88 See also market economy; middle class, US; national debt, US education, 280 book reading and, 271 in China, 170 college as, 269–271 democracy and, 169–170 disability and, 37 economy and, 169 immigrants and, 269–270 jobs and, 89–90 longevity and, 37–38 marriage and, 267 public school system and, 38, 269 skilled trades and, 270 wage and, 89–90 The Education of Henry Adams (Adams), 197, 198 Ehrlich, Paul, 5 elections.


pages: 495 words: 138,188

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time by Karl Polanyi

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, borderless world, business cycle, central bank independence, Corn Laws, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, inflation targeting, joint-stock company, Kula ring, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, price mechanism, profit motive, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor, Works Progress Administration

(There are even explanations for this, but this would draw me too far away from my main themes.) Rapid transformation destroys old coping mechanisms, old safety nets, while it creates a new set of demands, before new coping mechanisms are developed. This lesson from the nineteenth century has, unfortunately, all too often been forgotten by the advocates of the Washington consensus, the modern-day version of the liberal orthodoxy. The failure of these social coping mechanisms has, in turn, contributed to the erosion of what I referred to earlier as social capital. The last decade has seen two dramatic instances. I already referred to the disaster in Indonesia, part of the East Asia crisis.

Now, albeit too late, the consequences of those mistaken policies are being realized; but it will be all but impossible to entice the capital that has fled back into the country, except by providing assurances that, regardless of how the wealth is acquired, it can be retained, and doing so would imply, indeed necessitate, the preservation of the oligarchy itself. Economic science and economic history have come to recognize the validity of Polanyi’s key contentions. But public policy—particularly as reflected in the Washington consensus doctrines concerning how the developing world and the economies in transition should make their great transformations—seems all too often not to have done so. As I have already noted, Polanyi exposes the myth of the free market: there never was a truly free, self-regulating market system. In their transformations, the governments of today’s industrialized countries took an active role, not only in protecting their industries through tariffs, but also in promoting new technologies.

The American government protested loudly, saying that this was an abrogation of free market principles. Yet Hong Kong’s intervention paid off—it managed to stabilize both markets, warding off future threats on its currency, and making large amounts of money on the deals to boot. The advocates of the neoliberal Washington consensus emphasize that it is government interventions that are the source of the problem; the key to transformation is “getting prices right” and getting the government out of the economy through privatization and liberalization. In this view, development is little more than the accumulation of capital and improvements in the efficiency with which resources are allocated—purely technical matters.


pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

14 What many Brexit and Trump voters wanted was “their” national economy back. Meanwhile, China’s spectacular ascent robbed the economy of its innocence in another sense. It was no longer clear that the great gods of growth were on the side of the West. That, it turned out, disturbed an important assumption underpinning the Washington consensus. Soon America would no longer be number one. In fact, it was increasingly clear that the gods, at least as represented by the nature goddess Gaia, were at odds with economic growth full stop.15 Climate change, which had once been a preoccupation of the environmental movement alone, became an emblem for a wider imbalance between nature and humanity.

Even the highest risk low-income countries saw their hard currency debt triple over the five years to 2019 to more than $200 billion.4 Increasingly, the low- and middle-income economies joined the system of market-based finance, under the terms of what Daniela Gabor has called the “Wall Street consensus,” as distinct from the Washington consensus of the 1990s. In this new world of global finance, institutions like the IMF and the World Bank acted as auxiliaries not just to big banks, but also to asset managers and the operators of bond and derivative markets.5 Membership in this network was alluring, offering vast amounts of credit on seemingly easy terms.

At the end of 2019, almost half of the lowest-income countries in the world were already in debt distress.7 Decades of experience showed the peril, but rather than simply accepting their fate, the emerging markets learned.8 From the 1990s, they developed a repertoire of policies with which to manage the risks arising from the global financial system. The toolkit was a compromise between key elements of the free-market Washington consensus and more interventionist policies.9 Hedging the risks of global integration was not without cost. Nor did the new policy toolkit offer a guarantee of complete autonomy. The emerging markets had not discovered a magic formula for “taking back control.” Nor was that the point. They had found ways to make the risks of globalization more manageable, and that, frankly, suited everyone.10 Vulture funds might prey on distressed debtors.


Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Greenspan put, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mercator projection, Mont Pelerin Society, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Philip Mirowski, power law, price mechanism, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, statistical model, Suez crisis 1956, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

By the early 1980s this manifested in renewed attention to modes of investment protection and third-­party arbitration alongside the rethinking of criteria for World Bank aid and IMF assistance that would become known as the Washington Consensus.25 Equally impor­tant was the rise of monetarism, culminating in the ­so-­called Volcker Shock in 1979, which dramatically raised U.S. interest rates—­ and thus debt ser­ vice payments for Global South nations—­ initiating the Third World debt crisis and dealing the “death blow to the NIEO movement.”26 Scholars have tracked the rise of the Washington Consensus and shifts in ideologies of monetary governance in the United States. Yet A W o r l d of S ig n als 223 they have overlooked the quiet counterrevolution that the NIEO challenge prompted in Geneva itself.27 In the 1970s and early 1980s a trio of experts at the GATT, Jan Tumlir, Frieder Roessler, and Ernst-­Ulrich ­Petersmann, explic­itly applied the ideas of Hayek to rethink the international economic order and became the standard-­bearers of Geneva School neoliberalism.

It focuses on the period from the early 1920s to the early 1980s, mostly ending before the breakthrough of neoliberal policies with the governments of Reagan and Thatcher. It does not explore the worthy topics of the conversion of the IMF and World Bank to the policies that became known as the “Washington Consensus.” Similarly absent are the transformations in international monetary governance, including the rise of monetarism, the end of the Bretton Woods system, the introduction of the euro, and changes in central bank policy. This means 24 GLOBALISTS leaving out the all-­important question of finance, which was perhaps the single most impor­tant transformation in global capitalism since the 1970s.

The new brand was given another name when Pascal Lamy used the term “the Geneva Consensus” for the first time in 2005 during his successful campaign for director general of the WTO.55 He was working from his experience as the EU trade commissioner and, true to the spirit of ordoglobalism, contended that “the building of Eu­rope is in fact the most ambitious experiment in supranational governance ever attempted” and that, as “a laboratory,” “the Eu­ro­pean experience . . . ​offers in­ter­ est­ing ave­nues for the global level.”56 Lamy claimed that the Geneva Consensus, against the Washington Consensus that it putatively replaced, would be dedicated to “humanizing globalization and establishing further justice and equity.”57 Like the IMF, which began to pay lip ser­vice to poverty reduction while continuing to focus on the old key issues of cutting public bud­gets, the WTO sought to add new rhe­ toric without changing the basic structure of the organ­ization.58 Seattle was an existential crisis for ordoglobalism.


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To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton

affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, estate planning, eternal september, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invisible hand, liberation theology, longitudinal study, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, price anchoring, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, walkable city, Washington Consensus, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Works Progress Administration

Asked about the lasting impact of his years in Arkansas, Díaz recalled, “I met Sam Walton twice in person and quickly came to learn that fiÂ�nanÂ�cial success and Christianity were perfectly compatible: being successful and humble, being loving and demanding, being competitive and caring for others—all of these were compatible.”1 Díaz’s Christian testimony—his inspirational biography of salvation, success, and humility—is the quiet back story of free trade in the Americas. The ofÂ�fiÂ�cial story focuses on the hemisphere’s “Washington Consensus,” the term applied by a corporate think tank in 1989 to a suite of economic reforms that would encourage “the magic of the market” as the basis for hemispheric relations. Backed by the lending muscle of the World Bank and promoted by conservative economists like Milton Friedman, these recommendations included privatizing state enterprises, flattening tax rates, liberalizing trade, and relaxing government regulation.2 Though their consequences were uniquely devastating in much of Latin America, these policies were part of the overall economic transformation evident in the rise of the Sun Belt.

In the United States as well as for its southern neighbors, the result was a new era of federal austerity in ev�ery realm but defense. Social programs were slashed, from education to infrastructure to public health, while military spending increased by almost 50 percent over the Reagan years. States like California and Texas with sig�nifi�cant defense industries received billions in contracts.3 The Washington Consensus, in other words, functioned as the hardware of economic restructuring in the Western hemisphere. At the same time, conservative Christians took up the cause of anticommunism in Central America with new fervor in the 1970s and 1980s. As the Reagan administration funded right-wing counterinsurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala and sought to overturn the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua, it had no better stateside allies than religious conservatives.

The White House Office of Public Diplomacy, staffed by psychological warfare experts from the Army and the Central Intelligence Agency, coordinated a multimillion dollar PR campaign to “defin[e] the terms of public discussion on Central America policy.”4 Against this backdrop, the intersecting lives of a Nicaraguan student, an Oklahoma journalist, and an Arkansas merchant sketch a web of relationships between people and institutions that shadowed the Washington Consensus—a private-sector “Bentonville Consensus,” a software of globÂ�alÂ�iÂ�zaÂ�tion. Through a Walton Family Foundation program, this human network bridged the transition from the last Cold War proxy battles to the new frontier of hemispheric free trade in the 1990s. It was not part of the coordinated Christian and neoconservative campaign of direct aid to anticommunists, but rather a parallel incubator of promarket Christians.


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How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Economic diplomacy is now a dizzying game of musical tables—with the fate of globalization hanging in the balance. The first global economy took shape during the Middle Ages, but it was one in which different regions had their own anchors and rules. Similarly, today there is no more free-market “Washington Consensus” to which the world’s economies subscribe. Instead, each is searching for ways to manage globalization to its benefit. Yet all seem to agree with the mantra that the world coming out of the financial crisis must be different from the world going in. For that to happen, however, the public and private sectors need a new kind of partnership: one fast enough to manage risks and progressive enough to benefit the masses.

Who Has the Money Makes the Rules At the World Economic Forum’s 2009 Davos meeting, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao succinctly articulated what became the dominant narrative of the global financial crisis, claiming it had its roots in an “unsustainable model of development characterized by prolonged low savings and high consumption” and the “blind pursuit of profits.” What part of that do Washington and Wall Street not understand as they continue to demand higher consumption from Asians? Privatization and price liberalization—tenets of the Washington Consensus—have been steadily controlled by Asian governments ever since their late 1990s financial crisis. Indeed, the “global imbalances” that we constantly hear about are as much ideological as fiscal and monetary. The United States wants Asians to reverse an innate savings culture and more than a decade of insuring themselves against economic volatility by suddenly becoming voracious consumers.

Introduction to On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes: Classic Principles of Diplomacy and the Art of Negotiation by François de Callières. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Hart, Stuart L. Capitalism at the Crossroads: Aligning Business, Earth, and Humanity. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Wharton School Publishing, 2007. Held, David. The Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004. Held, David, and Anthony McGrew, eds. Governing Globalization: Power, Authority, and Global Governance. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002. Henderson, David. Misguided Virtue: False Notions of Corporate Social Responsibility. London: Institute for Economic Affairs, 2001.


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Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture by Justin McGuirk

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, dark matter, Day of the Dead, digital divide, Donald Trump, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, facts on the ground, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, mass immigration, megaproject, microcredit, Milgram experiment, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, Silicon Valley, starchitect, technoutopianism, unorthodox policies, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, Washington Consensus

Torre David is an anomaly, an accident of extreme circumstances, but it is precisely the kind of formal-informal hybrid that cities of the developing world need to explore if they are to start imagining a future that is different from the present. Learning from Latin America There was a time when, in the eyes of those exporting the policies of the Washington Consensus, Latin America was a byword for precariousness, corruption and illegal practices. Today, we are just as likely to think of Wall Street in the same terms. By contrast, Latin America’s economies are relatively stable, demonstrating the kind of growth that the US and Europe would die for, and its governments represent a bastion of progressive politics that has not yet had to dismantle its welfare systems in the name of austerity.

The number of favelados rose by 50 per cent, leaving a third of the population living in poverty. Government self-help schemes were simply not geared up to handling the scale of informal growth. But just when policy-makers were throwing their hands up, they were offered a lifeline in the form of a new liberal economic ideology. From the late 1980s onwards, with the Washington Consensus spreading south through the arm-twisting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the neoliberal agenda took control. Government’s job was to cut spending, privatise, and let the housing market regulate itself. In effect, Turner’s argument for self-determination was turned on its head by politicians who, now relieved of housing obligations, no longer had to pick up the ruinous bill.

If neoliberalism insists that utility companies are only fit to be sold off to the private sector, then many a municipal government, not to mention national ones, might look to Medellín and reconsider. The role that EPM played in the rehabilitation of Medellín is symptomatic of a political culture that has not yet bought into the Washington Consensus wholesale. This is ironic, because one of the critiques levelled at Medellín is that it embraced neoliberal development driven by profits from the narco-traffickers. Much has been made of the fact that cartel money was laundered through construction projects, that cartel gangs were involved in the ‘pacification’ of districts that were ripe for development and that, all in all, Medellín’s establishment was in bed with the mob.* All of which was true.


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

This was avoided by China, which has led to talk of the so-called Beijing Consensus serving as an alternative model for newly marketizing nations. In vogue after the success of China’s growth and the critiques levelled at the Washington Consensus, could the Chinese model be a model for Myanmar as it embarks on a historical opening to the global economy? Of course, there may not even be a consensus about the Beijing Consensus, as the Chinese growth experience cannot be easily modelled. And there are many elements of China’s marketization process that are similar to the Washington version. The Washington Consensus was a model of economic development promulgated during the 1980s and 1990s that stemmed from the IMF and US Treasury, both located in Washington, DC.

The model was premised on privatization and financial and trade liberalization. As a number of developing countries failed to benefit from following these prescriptions, which was seen both in the decade-long recession of the former Soviet Union during the 1990s and in the 1980s Latin American crisis, the Washington Consensus fell out of favour and developing countries sought an alternative. Some turned to China, whose market-oriented reforms proceeded at a more gradual pace and with sequencing of key reforms. For instance, state-owned enterprises were slowly reformed and were not subject to mass privatization until a couple of decades into the reform process.

Although with a different stress, the end result is the same: industrialization supports economic development. That shift to industry could launch Myanmar into the rapid-growth phase experienced by other Asian countries. So, the Beijing Consensus perhaps offers a better set of guidelines for Myanmar than the Washington Consensus as it is derived from the experience of its East Asian neighbours. About 70 per cent of Myanmar’s population are employed in the agriculture and resources sector, which accounts for over half of the country’s economic output. It means that there is a lot of scope to industrialize, which can launch a country into fast growth as it ‘catches up’, as occurred in the East Asian ‘miracle’ economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, which are among the few that have become rich in the post-war period.


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When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

The Asian tigers have instead demonstrated that latecomers can enjoy major advantages: they can learn from the experience of others, draw on and apply existing technologies, leapfrog old technologies, use the latest know-how and play catch-up to great effect. Their economic approach, furthermore, has largely been homespun, owing relatively little to neo-liberalism or the Washington Consensus - the dominant Western ideology from the late seventies until the financial meltdown in 2008.6 Nor is their novelty confined to the economic sphere. The Asian tigers have given birth to a new kind of political governance, namely the developmental state, whose popular legitimacy rests not on democratic elections but the ability of the state to deliver continued economic growth.7 The rise of the Asian tigers, however, has an altogether more fundamental import.

The contrasting approach of China and Western nations towards Africa, and developing countries in general, has led to a discussion amongst Africans about a distinctive Chinese model of development, characterized by large-scale, state-led investments in infrastructure and support services, and aid which is less tied to the donor’s economic interests and less overwhelmingly focused on the extraction of minerals as in the case of the West.40 China’s phenomenal growth, together with the huge reduction in poverty there, has also provoked enormous interest in what lessons it might offer for other developing nations.41 An important characteristic of the Chinese model has been the idea of strong government and the eschewing of the notion of democracy, an approach which has an obvious appeal amongst the more authoritarian African governments. In the light of the country’s economic success, the Chinese approach to governance seems destined to enjoy a much wider influence and resonance in the developing world. The Chinese academic Zhang Wei-Wei has argued that the Chinese model combines a number of features. In contrast to the Washington Consensus, it rejects shock therapy and the big bang in favour of a process of gradual reform based on working through existing institutions. It is predicated upon a strong developmental state capable of steering and leading the process of reform. It involves a process of selective learning, or cultural borrowing: China has drawn on foreign ideas, including the neo-liberal American model, as well as many that have been home-grown.

Finally, it embraces sequencing and priorities, as evidenced, for example, by a commitment to economic reforms first and political ones later, or the priority given to reforms in the coastal provinces before those in the inland provinces.42 There has been considerable debate, in this context, about a Chinese model, sometimes described as the Beijing Consensus. There are certainly fundamental differences between the Chinese approach and the Washington Consensus, with the Chinese model both markedly less ideological and also distinctively pragmatic in the manner of the Asian tigers. It is still far too early to make any considered judgement about the likely long-term merits and demerits of China’s relationship with Africa.43 The experience has been brief and the literature remains thin.


pages: 134 words: 41,085

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

Public spending there was chopped from 67 percent of GDP in 1993 to 49 percent of GDP, while the top marginal tax rate was cut by 27 percentage points. FAREWELL, WASHINGTON CONSENSUS So was this another revolution? Not really—or certainly not enough of one. At home, Thatcher and Reagan did more to change the debate about the state than they changed the state itself (possibly making reform more difficult). Abroad, the Washington consensus overreached. Privatization aside, neither Reagan nor Thatcher succeeded in reinventing the public sector for the global age they trumpeted. Reagan’s victory over the air traffic controllers did not change much: a study in 1996 found that air traffic controllers reported through sixteen layers of decision-makers (with the number rising to sixty layers when it came to policy and budget questions).10 In her eleven momentous years in office, Thatcher succeeded in reducing social spending from 22.9 percent of GDP in 1979 to 22.2 percent in 1990.


pages: 273 words: 87,159

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

It is useful to see this new policy direction in terms of the New Federalism that Nixon proposed in 1969 and the Washington Consensus formulated for developing countries in the 1990s. The New Federalism proposed to counter federal control of Roosevelt’s New Deal by converting specific grants to states into block grants, that is, shifting control over federal money from federal to state governments where state officials could preserve racial discrimination. Among the recommendations in common with the Washington Consensus are the desire for fiscal discipline in place of Keynesian polices, low marginal tax rates, low tariffs, privatization of state enterprises, and deregulation of private markets.

Holder and, 65, 89, 142, 159 slavery and, ix (see also Slavery) timing of elections and, 67–68 turnout rates and, 63–65 women and, 56, 58, 64–65, 67, 94 Voting Rights Act, 15, 58, 65, 67, 89, 94, 142, 159 Wages concepts of government and, 89–92 dual economy and, 3–13 FTE (finance, technology, and electronics) sector and, 16, 20–23, 25, 41–46 growth and, 3–4 Investment Theory of Politics and, 62, 65–70, 72, 75 low-wage sector and, 3, 27–41, 41–46 (see also Low-wage sector) race and, 49, 55, 60 real, 3–4, 21, 32–33 transition and, 41–46 very rich and, 79–81, 84 Walker, Scott, xv Wall Street, 24, 93 Walmart, 122 Walton family, 121 Warmth of Other Suns, The (Wilkerson), 20 War on Drugs, x, xv–xvi, 15, 27, 37–38, 53, 55, 104, 106, 110, 132 War on Poverty, 17, 27, 126, 168n2 Warren, Elizabeth, 53 Washington Consensus, 21 Water systems, 35–36, 129–130 Welfare Queens, 38, 171n27 Welfare state, 21, 80, 101, 104 Whistle blowers, 84 White flight, 34, 38, 117, 125, 179n7 White rage, 51, 101, 104 White supremacist organizations, 169n9 Wilkerson, Isabel, 20 Wilson, William J., 34–35, 39, 132 Witchcraft, 50 Within Our Reach (Schorr), 115, 124 Women, 12, 156 abortion and, 57–58, 72 bodily integrity and, 56–58 civic identity of, 56 college and, 57, 116 concepts of government and, 94 coverture and, 56 employment and, 59–60 English family law and, 56 equal protection clause and, 58, 67, 102 Fifteenth Amendment and, 15, 56 health care and, 56 inequality and, 12 Investment Theory of Politics and, 61, 64–65, 67 jury duty and, 59 mass incarceration and, 103, 106, 157 occupations available to, 59–60, 116 pregnancy and, 58 production and, 59 property rights of, 56–57 public education and, 115–116, 118, 120 rape and, 56–57, 108–109 suffrage and, 58, 64, 67 universities and, 57 voting rights and, 56, 58, 64–65, 67, 94 Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 57 Workers’ compensation, 4, 90–91 World War I era, ix, xi concepts of government and, 94 FTE (finance, technology, and electronics) sector and, 20–21 inequality and, 162 Investment Theory of Politics and low-wage sector and, 27 municipal water systems and, 129 production and, 20 public education and, 133 voting restrictions and, 67 World War II era, ix baby boomers and, 69, 104, 128 Bretton Woods and, 15 concepts of government and, 88, 92 conservative business movement and, 80–81 FTE (finance, technology, and electronics) sector and, 15, 21 GI Bill and, 34, 43, 52, 65 Investment Theory of Politics and, 69 low-wage sector and, 34 postwar prosperity and, 54, 88, 92, 162–164 production and, 3, 80–81 segregation and, 171n16 very rich and, 80–81 Zuckerberg, Mark, 122 Zucman, Gabriel, 82


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The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle, Andrew Simms

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Crossrail, delayed gratification, deskilling, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, financial deregulation, financial exclusion, financial innovation, full employment, garden city movement, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, light touch regulation, loss aversion, mega-rich, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working-age population

It survives to this day in most of the assumptions of mainstream regeneration and economic development, though it is even more obvious now than it was to Carville that wealth doesn’t trickle down, it floods up. In fact, of course, the great days of trickle down economics were still to come. Every government conditioned by the so-called Washington Consensus, as well as the all-powerful International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, believed that cutting taxes would in the end stimulate the economy, and – to start with – it did. But in the constant failure of regeneration, redistribution and community revitalization, it was increasingly obvious to most people outside that consensus that trickle down simply did not work.

It was more accurately an application of Darwin’s evolutionary theories to economics: a kind of survival of the economically fittest. But their interpretation of the ‘fit’ – the marketable, the profitable, the global – was not only a misreading of Darwin, but deeply inadequate. The financially ‘fit’ survived; those that did not fit into the shape of the new world, people, communities and nations, were bled dry. The Washington Consensus built a devastating machine that could bear no variation, and it assumed a kind of adolescent approach to morality by business, as if it were somehow exempt in the sacred duty of creating wealth. The corporate pioneer John D. Rockefeller once boasted that he was quite willing to pay someone a salary of a million dollars if he were brutal enough.

(Ernst Friedrich, ‘Fritz’) 1, 18, 21–2, 27, 114, 117 SDRs (special drawing rights) 147–8 Seattle (Washington) 41 seeds 91, 117, 119, 140, 141 seigniorage 58–9 Sen, Amartya 12 SERs (special emission rights) 148 set prices 80 sharing 34, 44, 91, 119, 140 shopping 26, 80, 82–3, 104, 105, 125, 133 shops 20 local 75, 80, 82–3, 104, 105, 124, 124–5, 126, 151 see also out-of-town retailing; supermarkets short-termism 11, 13, 14–15 SIVs (structured investment vehicles) 1, 5–6, 6 skills 13, 60, 98, 100, 101, 105, 132 190 THE NEW ECONOMICS Slow Food 118, 119–20 Small is Beautiful (Schumacher, 1977) 1, 21 small islands 31–2, 33–4 small-scale banks 146 Smith, Adam 89 social auditing 26, 45, 153–4 social banks 144, 146 social capital 19, 33, 54–5, 86–7, 89, 126–7, 132 Wal-mart and 124–5 social credit 19, 58, 59, 90 social networks 36, 127, 132 social norms 67–8, 71 social relationships 34, 45 social return on investment (SROI) 45 Soros, George 51, 148 South Africa 136 South African New Economics (Sane) 58 South Shore Bank (Chicago) 144 sovereignty 55, 113 special drawing rights (SDRs) 147–8 special emission rights (SERs) 148 speculation 22, 53, 81, 82, 84, 146, 158 deterring 51–2, 60, 61 financial 7, 15, 50–1, 51–2, 61 spirituality 4–5, 18, 21–2, 75, 79, 81 SROI (social return on investment) 45 Stamp Out Poverty 61 Starkey, Richard 118 state 12–13, 28, 155 see also governments steady-state economy 43, 44 Stern Report (Stern, 2006) 155 Stiglitz, Joseph 61 stress 4, 35, 37, 83 structured investment vehicles see SIVs sub-prime loans 1, 5–7, 144 sub-Saharan Africa 82 ‘subsidiarity’ 117 subsidies 11, 82, 112, 113, 117, 119, 123–4 success 79–80, 89 measuring 2, 8, 10, 43, 44, 55, 154, 156, 158 suicides 83, 91, 140 super rich 120, 141, 142 supermarkets 80, 85, 90, 104, 105, 123–6, 129 sustainability 24, 73, 89, 113, 114, 116, 117 sustainable development 51–2, 61 Swann, Bob 120, 151 Sweden 102 Swift, Jonathan 18 Switzerland 52, 62 T-bills (Treasury bills) 49–50, 58 takeovers 84, 142, 143 talent system 58 targets 9, 41, 129 tariffs 113 tax havens 15, 52–3, 53, 61, 136, 157 Tax Justice Network 136–7 taxation 73, 92, 116 taxes 10, 15, 27, 32, 43, 62, 136–7 paid by corporations 52, 61, 137, 157 TB (tuberculosis) 130, 148 TEQs (tradeable energy quotas) 117–18 terra (currency) 56, 61, 120 Tesco 85, 116, 125 Thatcher, Margaret 21, 22, 23, 27 The Other Economic Summit see TOES Thoreau, Henry David 69 time 44, 45–6, 60, 103, 132 time banks 58, 59, 60, 89, 92, 123, 131, 132 Titmuss, Richard 65, 70 Tobin, James 51–2 Tobin Levy 51–2, 61 TOES (The Other Economic Summit) 23–5 Toffler, Alvin 88 trade 25, 81, 109–10, 111–15, 116, 148, 158 fair trade 26, 119, 145, 153 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property see TRIPS tradeable energy quotas (TEQs) 117–18 traffic speed 65–6, 74 transport 67, 74, 112, 115 see also public transport Treasury bills (T-bills) 49–50, 58 INDEX trickle down 27–8, 39–40, 138 ‘doesn’t work’ 27, 52, 104 TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property) agreement (1995) 113, 117 tuberculosis (TB) 130, 148 Turning Point network 23 UK (United Kingdom) 4, 39, 55, 61, 70, 85, 119, 145 aid from 136 corporation tax gap 137 cultural enrichment 111 debt 83, 141 Ecological Debt Day 114 energy 102, 114 food production 96, 114 Happy Planet Index 32 ‘illth’ 4, 35 interest rates 144–5 local savings schemes 61 money deposits 136 orchard loss 111, 112, 115, 124 poverty 82 real costs of road transport 115 super-casinos 14 trade 112, 113 well-being 4, 35–6, 41, 68 working hours 68 young people in 35–6 see also house prices Ukraine 110 UN (United Nations) 39, 51–2, 60, 91, 110–11, 157 unemployment 44, 46, 55–6, 91–2, 157 unpaid work 87–9 Unto This Last (Ruskin, 1860) 18, 29 USA (United States) 39, 57, 61, 82, 113, 119, 127, 157 and Cuba 95 debt 49–50, 84, 141 Happy Planet Index 32 invasion of Iraq (2003) 49, 60 subsidies 11, 113 trade deficit 50 191 unemployment 55 well-being deteriorating 41, 68 usury 80, 81, 144–5 value 44, 98, 99 measuring 10, 15, 29, 53, 59, 115 values 11, 71, 115, 127 Vanuatu 31–2, 35, 42 Vaxjo (Sweden) 102 vegetable box schemes 104 ‘victory gardening movement’ 96 Virgil, Eclogues 110 voluntary sector 13, 87, 132, 145 voting 124–5, 127 Wal-mart 104, 123, 124–5 Wall Street Crash (1929) 1, 51, 90 Waring, Marilyn 38–9 Washington Consensus 27–8 waste 97, 100–1, 158 Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive see WEEE directive wealth 18, 28, 38, 41–2, 52, 89, 141–2, 152 defining 18–19, 32, 34, 35, 38 and ‘illth’ 29, 35–6 local 14, 53–4 measuring 32, 36–40, 53–4, 143 money and 19, 32, 38, 78, 143 new economics and 3, 15, 35, 37 real 2, 32, 37–40 see also Happy Planet Index WEDGE project 23 WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) directive 98, 100, 101 welfare 25, 28, 44, 127, 129, 153 Welfare State 19, 129 well-being 4–5, 25, 45–6, 99, 158 demand for 4–5, 11, 68–9 falls in 4, 37, 41, 68, 78 GDP and 4, 36, 37 measuring 4, 18, 32–3, 34, 43 money and 18, 21, 81 as motivation 4–5, 11, 68–9, 72 new economics and 41–7, 68–9 192 THE NEW ECONOMICS origins of 43 willingness to pay 99 Willington, Sally 23 Wir currency 62 Witt, Susan 151 Woking (Surrey) 102–3 women 38–9, 77–8, 79, 83, 144 work 24, 45, 81, 84–5, 86–7, 92 concept of 25, 83, 86, 87–9 to pay mortgages 46, 68, 73, 77–8, 79, 81, 83, 84, 89, 126–7, 140 of women 38–9, 77–8, 83 working hours 45–6, 78, 79, 83, 92 World Bank 27, 81, 82, 91, 137, 139, 143, 147 Yank Tanks (film, Schendel, 2002) 95 young people, UK 35–6 youth courts 129, 132 Yunus, Mohammed 143–4 Zimbabwe 32 Zurich (Switzerland) 66


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The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

The Latin American governments slashed much of the fat in their budgets and shifted to more austere economic policies, and the financial sectors began the long, hard road of reform toward the necessary standards of accounting. The approach, which was the developing world's version of what Reagan and Thatcher had begun in the United States and Britain just a few years before, became known as the Washington consensus, referring to the policies encouraged by global institutions like the World Bank and IMF (International Monetary Fund), which are based in Washington. The program called for privatization of state-run monopolies, deregulation of governmental control over business, lower trade barriers, lower barriers to foreign investment, reform of the tax systems, a focus on fiscal and monetary policies for fighting inflation, and the maintenance of a competitive foreign exchange rate.

The program called for privatization of state-run monopolies, deregulation of governmental control over business, lower trade barriers, lower barriers to foreign investment, reform of the tax systems, a focus on fiscal and monetary policies for fighting inflation, and the maintenance of a competitive foreign exchange rate. The Latin Americans had bitten the bullet on this approach by the late 1980s, but following the Washington consensus was a very difficult process, so difficult, in fact, that the Latin Americans call the period the "lost decade." For example, the per capita income in Latin America in 1990 was less than that in 1980. However, despite the pain, in many countries the restructuring effort achieved its purpose. By the late 1990s, when Asia and much of the developing world was succumbing to a near financial meltdown, Latin America was able to hold back disaster indefinitely.

See microprocessors Connections, See Networks Christian Democratic coalition, 94, Control vs. complexity, 263-265 113 Copernicus, 212 Chrysler, 60, 175 Corporations, 2, 42-45, 121 Citibank, 262 Climate change Corruption, 114-115, 126 COX2, 190 developing vs. developed worlds, 157-159 Crime, 285-286 floods, 150 Culture preservation, 234 forest fires, 150-151 Cuyahoga River, 156 global warming, 10, 152-154 Cyberspace libraries, 89 Hurricane Andrew, 149,150 Cystic fibrosis, 198 Hurricane Mitch, 150 overview, 148-154 Daimler-Benz, 60,171, 174 pollution in China, 158-159 D'Alema, Massimo, 94 regional weather problems, 151 Dark matter, 213 tornadoes, 151 Databases, 215-216 United Nation's Conference on Decentralization Climate Change, 157 personal computers and, 19, 26 Clinton, President Bill, 41, 52, 76, ragtag computer techies fostering, 92, 121 28-30 Cloning, 195-199 of telecommunications, 22,178 Club of Rome, 162 of utilities industry, 178-181 Coal, 158-159 Defense Advanced Research Projects Coca Cola, 112 Agency (DARPA), 50 Code of honor, 28-30 Delphi Energy & Engine Cold fusion, 219-220 Management Systems, 176 Cold War, 48, 49, 134-135, 22 Deming, W, Edwards, 119 Colorado, 267 Democracy Communism, 40, 116, 262 free markets and, 111-112, 115 Compassionate conservatism, 274 growth of middle class and, 235 Complexity theory, 263-265 media freedom in, 114 Computers rule of twos in, 112-114 economic decentralization and, in Singapore, 269 19, 26, 28-30 transparency rule, 114-115 impact of, 189-190 women in, 250 326 Democratic Party, 76-77 Democrats of the Left, 92 Deng, Xiaoping, 48, 116 Depression, 51-52 Deregulation of European businesses, 93 of U.S. businesses, 41 of utilities industry, 178,180-181 in Washington consensus, 96 Detroit Edison, 178 Digital technologies, 25-26 Diversity, 248, 273 DNA, 188-189, 197-198 Dolly, 195 Dow Jones Industrial Average, 47, 92 Downsizing, 42, 93 Drake, Frank, 220 Drake's equation, 220 Drexler, Eric, 203-204, 208 Dust Bowl, 149 Earth Day, 160 Earth Summit, 157 East vs. West.


pages: 421 words: 120,332

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith

Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, colonial rule, data science, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, electricity market, energy security, flex fuel, G4S, global supply chain, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, guest worker program, Hans Island, hydrogen economy, ice-free Arctic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, land tenure, Martin Wolf, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Y2K

Agnew, Hegemony: The New Shape of Global Power (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005). 31 The Washington Consensus is attributed to John Williamson of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a think tank in Washington, D.C. (www.iie.com). Its policies have now been adopted by (or forced onto, depending on one’s point of view) many developing countries. Neoliberals praise these reforms, citing new markets and jobs for struggling people. Critics point to two-dollar-a-day wages while multinational corporations grow rich. The Washington Consensus and similar policies remain highly controversial. If you have any antiglobalization friends, mention it to them sometime and watch their mouths foam. 32 “Expanding trade and investment has been one of the highest priorities of my administration. . . .

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the IMF, WTO, and World Bank aggressively pursued agendas of liberalizing (deregulating) trade markets around the world, vigorously urged on by the United States.30 A common tactic was to require developing countries to accept neoliberal reforms to qualify for IMF or World Bank loans. This practice was exemplified by the “Washington Consensus,” a controversial list of hard-nosed reforms including trade deregulation, opening to direct foreign investment, and privatization of state enterprises.31 In the United States, presidents from both political parties also worked to dismantle international trade barriers. Of particular importance to this book was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), proposed in 1991 by President George Herbert Walker Bush to remove trade barriers between the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

Geological Survey (USGS) U.S. Minerals and Management Service U.S. National Intelligence Council U.S. National Science Foundation Uzbekistan Vancouver, British Colombia Varlomov, Alexei Venezuela Verkhoyansk, Russia Vietnam Vikings volcanoes Volta River Vörösmarty, Charlie Walmart warfare Washington Consensus Water Follies (Glennon) water resources: and agriculture; aquifers; and climate change; crises related to; and drought; and energy consumption; export projects; and foreign policy; and global water stress; and groundwater pumping; and hydropower; importance of; and the Intertropical Convergence Zone; large water projects; measurement of; and population growth; and privatization; prospects for; and runoff; and sanitation; and snowpack and glaciers; and transboundary rivers; and urbanization; and virtual water trade WaterGAP Watt-Cloutier, Sheila weather patterns.


pages: 471 words: 124,585

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

Now the role of financial policing had to be played by two unarmed bankers, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Their new watch-word became ‘conditionality’: no reforms, no money. Their preferred mechanism was the structural adjustment programme. And the policies the debtor countries had to adopt became known as the Washington Consensus, a wish-list of ten economic policies that would have gladdened the heart of a British imperial administrator a hundred years before.bc Number one was to impose fiscal discipline to reduce or eliminate deficits. The tax base was to be broadened and tax rates lowered. The market was to set interest and exchange rates.

It was actually the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that blazed the liberalizing trail, followed (after the conversion of French socialists like Jacques Delors and Michel Camdessus) by the European Commission and European Council. Indeed, there was arguably a Paris Consensus before there was a Washington Consensus (though in many ways it was building on a much earlier Bonn Consensus in favour of free capital markets).64 In London, too, Margaret Thatcher’s government pressed ahead with unilateral capital account liberalization without any prompting from the United States. Rather, it was the Reagan administration that followed Thatcher’s lead.

Jaime Roldós Aguilera of Ecuador . . . . . . and Omar Torrijos of Panama: Allegedly victims of the ‘economic hit men’ Stiglitz’s biggest complaint against the IMF is that it responded the wrong way to the Asian financial crisis of 1997, lending a total of $95 billion to countries in difficulty, but attaching Washington Consensus-style conditions (higher interest rates, smaller government deficits) that actually served to worsen the crisis. It is a view that has been partially echoed by, among others, the economist and columnist Paul Krugman.65 There is no doubting the severity of the 1997-8 crisis. In countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea and Thailand there was a very severe recession in 1998.


pages: 651 words: 135,818

China into Africa: trade, aid, and influence by Robert I. Rotberg

barriers to entry, BRICs, colonial rule, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, low interest rates, megacity, megaproject, microcredit, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Scramble for Africa, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, trade route, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Disillusionment induced by the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War and the seeming global triumph of the Washington Consensus led to a cessation of the debate in the 1990s. 13-7561-4 ch13.qxd 9/16/08 4:23 PM Page 288 288 ndubisi obiorah, darren kew, and yusuf tanko The ensuing period was characterized by structural adjustment, poverty reduction, and other economic reform programs imposed on African governments by Western donors and international finance institutions. Many Africans, including intellectuals and civil society actors, perceive that their governments’ adoption of the Washington Consensus has failed to deliver both bread and freedom. African rulers learned that they could successfully engage in a sleight of hand by adopting the barest minimum in political and economic reforms, which would permit bureaucracies to continue aid flows to their countries, while vigorously resisting substantive change.

This success, often attributed to China’s state-led development model, has rekindled the debate in Africa over appropriate paths to development and encouraged many Africans to look to East Asia for political and economic models. Many in Africa question the wisdom of remaining wedded to the Washington Consensus and ask if indeed bread does not count more than the vote, and if human rights and democracy are not really of secondary concern to attaining political stability and economic progress. The debate in Africa over the China model is not, however, based on a romantic vision. Admiration among the Nigerian media for China’s economic success is often balanced with acute recognition of its social costs and the lack of political freedoms.

-China Economic and Security Family Planning Association, 205; Review Commission, 181, 218 16-7561-4 index.qxd 9/16/08 4:25 PM Page 338 338 Index Value-added products, 99, 106–07 West Kordofan, Sudan, 178 Venezuela, 163 Whelan, Theresa, 168 Vietnam, 26, 71; foreign aid and, 198; White Nile River, 171 network trade and, 107 Whites, 260, 263 Vines, Alex, 40 Wolfowitz, Paul, 218, 302 Wood Mackenzie (analysts firm), 120 Wade, Abdoulaye, 75, 242 World Bank, 261; aid coordination and, WAHUM Fabrics, 291 303, 308; on China as creditor, 302; Wang Dongming, 240 Chinese foreign aid and, 208, 210, Wang Jiarui, 240 218; Eximbank and, 198; high pay- Wang Qiming, 35 ments and, 123; tripartite coopera- Warri, Nigeria, 281 tion and, 205; vs. China model, 288 Washington Consensus, 287–88 World Health Organization (WHO), Van der Wath, Kobus, 52 301 Websites, 219, 240; concessional loans World Trade Organization (WTO), 2, and, 219–20, 223, 226 51, 68, 213; China’s entry into, 58, 68 Wei Jianguo, 34 Wu Bangguo, 241–42 WEMPCO (Western Metal Products Wu Guanzheng, 24 Company), 291 Wu Xueqian, 28 Wen Jiabao, 120; foreign aid and, 209; visits to Africa by, 3, 51, 53 Xiamen, China, 138–40 Wenran Jiang, 13 Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, West, 116–17, 213, 217–18, 243; African 12 resources and, 290; anticolonialism and, 231; arms transfers and, 163; Yangtze River Delta, 138 balance of power and, 273, 290; Yar’Adua, Umaru, 275 China as alternative to, 274, 287; on Youth militias, 261 China as creditor, 303; Chinese- African partnership and, 299; condi- Zaire (Democratic Republic of Congo), tional assistance and, 251; 27, 157–59; debt-equity swaps and, development model of, 287–88, 298; 205 human rights and, 263–64; image of, Zambia, 6, 11, 27–28, 56, 117; arms 305; imperialism and, 157; market transfers to, 163; China model and, reforms and, 234; military assistance 273; Copperbelt region, 143–44; crit- and, 159, 174; Nigeria and, 277; oil icism of China by, 301; development and, 109–11, 281, 305; oil strategy and, 146; elections in, 235; foreign and, 109–12; post-Cold War era and, aid and, 200; immigrant backlash in, 300; reforms and, 290–91; Sudan 272–73; infrastructure and, 74; and, 124–25; transparency and, 124; Kaunda and, 146; labor and, 122; Zimbabwe and, 261 military ties to, 155–56, 158, 161, West Africa, 100, 106; SEZs and, 148 173; mining in, 252; as recipient of Western Sahara: peacekeeping in, Chinese arms, 9–10; SEZs and, 6, 176–77 140; Tanzam Railway and, 147 16-7561-4 index.qxd 9/16/08 4:25 PM Page 339 Index 339 Zambia Privatization Agency, 147 culpability and, 252, 261–63, 264–66; Zanzibar, 158 conflict in, 308; Confucius Institutes Zhai Jun, 175, 306 in, 29, 78; corruption and, 301; dele- Zhao Ziyang, 28, 203–05; four princi- gations from, 242; human rights and, ples of, 26–27 14–15, 55, 251, 260–61; military Zhejiang Normal University, 29 assistance and, 159–61, 173–75; Zheng He, 116, 179–80 stability-building efforts in, 17; Zhong Xing Telecommunication Equip- trade with, 6, 55; visited by Chinese ment Company, 275 leaders, 28 Zhongyuan Petroleum Exploration Zimbabwe African National Union— Bureau, 179 Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), 242, Zhou Enlai, 23, 146, 231; China’s oil 260–61 strategy and, 112; eight principles of, Zimbabwe African National Union 26–27; foreign aid and, 200 (ZANU), 156, 260 Zhu Di, 116 Zimbabwe African People’s Union Zhuhai, China, 138, 140 (ZAPU), 260 Zimbabwe, 3, 10, 69, 81, 156; antidemo- Zimbabwe Staff College, 175 cratic regimes in, 11–15, 37; arms Zoellick, Robert, 306–07 transfers and, 9–10, 163; Chinese ZTE Corporation, 167 16-7561-4 index.qxd 9/16/08 4:25 PM Page 340 Document Outline Table of Contents Preface Chapter 1: China's Quest for Resources, Opportunities, and Influence in Africa Chapter 2: China's New Policy toward Africa Chapter 3: China's Emerging Strategic Partnerships in Africa Chapter 4: Africa and China: Engaging Postcolonial Interdependencies Chapter 5: Chinese-African Trade and Investment Chapter 6: Searching for Oil Chapter 7: Special Economic Zones Chapter 8: Military and Security Relations Chapter 9: China's Foreign Aid in Africa Chapter 10: Chinese Concessional Loans Chapter 11: China's Political Outreach to Africa Chapter 12: China's Role in Human Rights Abuses in Africa Chapter 13: "Peaceful Rise" and Human Rights Chapter 14: China's Renewed Partnership with Africa Contributors Index Table of Contents Partnerships in Africa


pages: 606 words: 87,358

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

In the first wave of thinking, the standard way of implementing this “big push” was to reserve the local market to local productions by raising import tariffs sky-high. This was called the “import substitution industrialization” strategy. Its widespread failure was brought home by the 1980s debt crises. A second wave of theories, called the “Washington Consensus,” embraced the same virtuous cycle groundwork but relied more on free markets as the cycle starter. By the time Lindauer and Pritchett penned their piece, enthusiasm for the second wave had gone flat. Many tried it but few succeeded. Worse yet, the success stories seemed to defy the thinking.

See also bilateral investment treaties (BTIs) The Foundations of Science (Poincaré), 281 fractionalization (fragmentation) of production, 137, 142, 168, 175–176, 196–206, 203f, 231, 232, 290, 291 France, 188. See also Europe; G7 Frantz, Brian, 49 free trade, 101, 125, 129, 161, 166, 190–191, 193–196, 194f, 209. See also GATT; liberal policies; Washington Consensus Friedman, Thomas, 142 Fujita, Masahisa, 127, 179 future (third unbundling), 8–10, 281–301 G7/global North/developed nations, 5–7; agglomeration and, 129, 188; BITs and, 104; communication and, 286–287; domestic value-added in export growth by sector 1994-2008, 94f, 95, 96; exports and, 151–154, 153f; GATT and, 101; global GDP share and, 48f, 81f, 89–, 92f, 93, 186; global income share of 1500-2020, 2f–3; Great Convergence and, 136; ICT/comparative advantage and, 139, 144; ideas and, 124; income divergence and, 57, 59; industrial clustering and, 124; industrialization and, 5, 55–56, 59–60, 60f, 61, 109; manufacturing and, 3f, 86–87, 88f, 89, 90f, 91, 133; national vs. corporate interest and, 169–170; New Globalization and, 12, 110, 143–144, 163f; New Globalization policies and, 225–241; Old Globalization (first unbundling) and, 78, 123; people-moving costs and, 7; servicification and, 155, 156–160; skilled workers and, 205; social policies and, 240; tariffs and, 72f, 100f, 101; trade with developing nations, 161; transfer of knowledge and, 175; urbanization and, 63; workers and, 13, 162, 165, 166, 168.

See also global value chains (GVCs) Van Reenen, John, 200 Venables, Tony, 127, 179, 195, 208–211 Venezuela, 95. See also Latin America; R11 (Rising Eleven) Versailles Treaty, 64 Vietnamese case studies, 262, 270, 275–276 Vietnamese case study, 145–146 virtual presence, 98 visas, 239, 240 wages, 8, 12–13, 186–187, 201–202, 232, 290, 292 Wallerstien, Immanuel, 208 Washington Consensus, 244 water transport, inland, 49 The Wealth of Nations (Smith), 39, 40, 198–199 Weinberg, Gerhard, 66 “What’s the Big Idea? The Third Generation of Policies for Economic Growth” (Lindauer and Pritchett), 243, 244 “When Did Globalization Begin?” (O’Rourke and Williamson), 53 “Where Ricardo and Mill Rebut and Confirm Arguments of Mainstream Economists Supporting Globalization” (Samuelson), 147–148 Why the West Rules—For Now (Morris), 25 Williamson, Jeff, 5, 53 Wilson, Charles Erwin, 169–170 Wilson, Woodrow, 64 Winkler, Deborah, 272 wire harnesses examples, 79, 260, 261, 270 workers and jobs: cities and, 235; future and, 164–165, 284–285, 294–295; global value chains and, 230–231; manufacturing and, 232–234; New Globalization (second unbundling) and, 162, 164–170, 166f, 175, 176, 225, 236; Old/New Globalization compared, 166f–169; textile-mill, 236–237.


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The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, National Debt Clock, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shock, open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The future is already here, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

As a result, it held hegemony not just in military power and diplomacy but in the realm of ideas. Central bankers and treasury ministers around the world studied the basics of their profession at American schools. Politicians developed their economies by following the advice prescribed by the Washington consensus. The innovations of Silicon Valley were the envy of the world. New York’s deep, lucrative capital markets were admired and imitated on every continent except Antarctica. As Brad Setser, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has noted, globalization after World War II was almost synonymous with Americanization.

When I have put the same question to Indian or Latin American officials, they launch into complicated explanations of the need for rural welfare, subsidies for poor farmers, and other such programs, all designed to slow down market forces and retard the historical—and often painful—process of market-driven industrialization. But Beijing’s approach has also been different from that advocated by many free-market economists—a program of simultaneous reforms on all fronts that is sometimes called the “Washington consensus.” Most significantly, it is different from Russia’s shock therapy approach under Boris Yeltsin, which Chinese leaders studied carefully and often cite as a negative example, probably agreeing with Strobe Talbot’s pithy description when he served in the Clinton administration: “Too much shock, too little therapy.”

Information Services, 271 Uttar Pradesh, 179 Uzbekistan, 54 Valentine’s Day, 88 Vedrine, Hubert, 246 Véliz, Claudio, 187 Venezuela, 6, 19, 31, 55, 190, 194n venture capital, 201–2 Vesalius, Andreas, 68 Victoria, Queen of England, 184–85 Vietnam, 20, 133–34, 143, 157, 199, 252, 281, 284 Vietnam War, 20, 199, 252, 284 Vijayanagar, 67 visas, travel, 280 Voice of America, 96 Volcker, Paul, 25 Voltaire, 123 wage levels, 67, 206, 207, 229, 282 Wahhabism, 12 Wall Street Journal, 209 Walmart, 104, 281 warfare, 69, 73, 76, 85–86 War of 1812, 194 war on terror, 29, 241, 264, 269, 272–73, 276–80 “Washington consensus,” 107 Washington Post, 30, 211 Watergate scandal, 284 water supplies, 33 wealth, 65–67, 70n, 75, 76, 93–94, 151–52, 215–16 weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), 17, 250 Weber, Steven, 38 WEF Competitiveness Index, 212–13 Welch, Jack, 228 Weller, Robert, 126 Wen Jiabao, 114, 119, 134, 135 Western culture, 1–5, 15, 38, 41, 62–99, 126–27 wheat prices, 21, 31, 67 Whelan, Theresa, 270 Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, 186n Wilson, Woodrow, 182 Wohlforth, William, 257 Wolf, Martin, 139, 232 women’s rights, 88–89, 93, 157–58, 160–61 working class, 216 World Bank, 24, 41, 55, 130 World Economic Forum, 146–47, 200, 212–13 World Economy, The: A Millennial Perspective, (Maddison), 66n World Trade Organization (WTO), 5, 27, 108, 137 World War I, 162, 190, 191, 195, 253 World War II, 20, 36–38, 40, 101, 134–35, 195–97, 253, 254, 256, 284 Wu Jianmin, 118, 128 Xinghai Fang, 118–19 Yalta Conference (1945), 196, 254 Yangtze River, 71, 111 Yeltsin, Boris, 107 yen, value of, 282 Youth (Conrad), 85 Yugoslavia, 10, 245 yutori kyoiku (relaxed education), 212 Yu Yongding, 49 Zambezi, 80 Zarqawi, Abu Mussab al-, 12 Zawahiri, Ayman, 13, 15 Zenawi, Meles, 130 Zheng Bijian, 119 Zheng He, 62–64, 70, 71, 77 Zimbabwe, 26, 130 * Even if an attack were to take place tomorrow, the fact that, for nine years, Al Qaeda Central has been unable to organize one explosion anywhere is surely worth noting


pages: 920 words: 233,102

Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State by Paul Tucker

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, conceptual framework, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, Greenspan put, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Northern Rock, operational security, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, seigniorage, short selling, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Administrative agencies now regulate the terms of trade (competitive conditions) in many industries, health and safety at work and in public spaces, the quality of goods and services sold to consumers, social discrimination, the quality of public services, and the integrity of the higher reaches of the state (public appointments, electoral practices, legislators’ expenses). Furthermore, since the 1990s international organizations have been promoting independent agencies as a “good thing.” Central bank independence was prominent in the 1990s’ “Washington Consensus” on global macroeconomic and financial management. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) advocates independence for financial regulators. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) promotes delegated governance across a wider terrain.1 There is something striking about an official consensus in favor of insulating policy from politics articulated by institutions that are themselves nonmajoritarian, as critics are not slow to point out.

As CBI spread, it became harder to buck the trend, via what some have termed mimesis.9 Eventually, this was institutionalized in canons of orthodoxy. In Europe, that came through the Delors Report’s strong recommendation that any monetary union be founded upon an independent central bank. In the wider world, it worked through IMF advocacy and, in specific cases, conditions attached to support packages, as part of the so-called Washington Consensus.10 Pristine and Parsimonious For a couple of decades, the monetary policy conducted under this global standard was fairly simple and straightforward. Compared with much of the administrative state, central banks did not rely on a plethora of “key performance indicators,” which are useful for managing projects and for delivery functions but not for facilitating public debate on achieving a public purpose.

Arguably, it is natural to read the first clause as an objective (albeit one that, in terms of the Principles, is hard to monitor) and the second as the purpose (Fisher, “Financial Stability,” and Tucker, “Monetary Policy”). 9 McNamara, “Rational Fictions.” 10 Williamson, “Washington”; and a retrospective, distinguishing between earlier and later versions of the package, in Fischer, “The Washington Consensus.” 11 O’Neill, A Question of Trust and “Perverting Trust.” 12 Woodford, “Principles and Public Policy,” makes similar points. As it happens, I do not share the enthusiasm for some of the specific substantive principles Woodford advances, which I think mix up practicable policy in a world of wobbly rationality with ideal metastandards for evaluating earthly economic life. 13 Hetzel and Leach, “Treasury-Fed Accord.” 14 Woodward, Maestro. 15 Volcker, “Triumph of Central Banking?”


What We Say Goes: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

banking crisis, British Empire, Doomsday Clock, failed state, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, informal economy, liberation theology, mass immigration, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, oil shale / tar sands, operational security, peak oil, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

If you take a look at the last twenty-five years, growth rates have sharply declined in countries that have adopted the policies he loves. The countries that have done very well—China, South Korea, Taiwan—have done so by violating the rules that Friedman advocates. These countries radically violated International Monetary Fund and World Bank rules—the Washington consensus, which he praises—and they grew. On the other hand, the countries that observed neoliberal rules rigorously had an extremely sharp decline in economic growth and just about every other macroeconomic measure. In fact, the United States doesn’t follow the rules that it imposes on others. During the last twenty-five years, to the extent that there has been a limited imposition of neoliberalism in the United States, it’s been the worst prolonged period in U.S. economic history.

These figures are muddled in the pronouncements by the World Bank and by many economists who argue that growth has really improved greatly and poverty has been reduced by neoliberal rules. The way they get these results is by mixing together two quite different things: one is export orientation and the other is following the Washington consensus, the neoliberal rules. So China, which has a population of one billion people, has been dedicated to export promotion but has also violated the neoliberal rules. If you muddle all of this together, you can say, “Well, the neoliberal rules work because a billion Chinese had a high growth rate,” forgetting that they had a high growth rate by violating the neoliberal rules.


pages: 182 words: 55,234

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, edge city, fake news, Frank Gehry, high net worth, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, McMansion, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

This means winning a two-thirds majority in a lame-duck legislative body that is still filled with his opponents, and the bulk of the movie is a close study of the lobbying and persuading and self-censoring to which Lincoln and his team must descend in order to, well, free the slaves. These are the lessons for our time that Spielberg has plucked from Goodwin’s Lincoln saga. And upon beholding the film, the upholders of the Washington consensus saw the clouds part and the sun shine through. Yet another commonplace had been magnificently reaffirmed—and this time it was the emptiest D.C. cliché of all. “It’s compromise,” is how Goodwin summarized the film’s message for an interviewer. And the commentariat chimed in unison: Yes! We have learned from this movie, they sang, that politicians must Make Deals.

We hear a lot these days about the dangers to speech posed by political correctness, about those insane left-wing college students who demand to be shielded from uncomfortable ideas. What I am describing here is something similar but far more consequential. It is the machinery by which the boundaries of the Washington consensus are enforced. You will recall how, after the Nevada unpleasantness, Eugene Robinson, who claimed to share Sanders’s philosophy, nonetheless condemned the candidate’s criticism of the Democratic Party’s nominating process as “reckless in the extreme.” Impugning the party, Robinson argued, might empower Donald Trump.


American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup by F. H. Buckley

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, crony capitalism, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Stephen Fry, Suez crisis 1956, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

Individually, we enjoy a well-protected set of personal liberties, the freedom to speak our mind and practice our religion, as well as the economic freedom to hold property and start a business. We also enjoy a strong set of political rights that come with living in a democratic society where government officials must campaign for our votes. We used to think that personal and political freedoms went together, like horse and carriage. This was called the “Washington Consensus.” When a state liberalized its economy it would create a middle class that would demand political freedom. That seemed to be what had happened in Chile, when the freemarket Pinochet regime was followed by a liberal democracy. Insofar as this pattern was spreading around the globe, it represented what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history,” the point where the big questions of politics have been settled.

White Utah Uyghurs Venezuela Vermont Verneule, Adrian “Vices of the Political System of the United States” (Madison) Vietnam; war in Virginia; and Davis trial; and Peace Convention; on secession rights Virginia Plan (Madison) Virginia Resolutions (1798) Voting Rights Act (1965) Vriend v. Alberta Wag the Dog (film) Wall Street Journal Walpole, Horace War of 1812 Warren, Earl Washington (state) Washington, George; and Carlisle Commission; erasure of; on foreign entanglements; on representative ratio Washington Consensus Washington Monthly Washington Peace Convention (1861) Washington Post wealth (GDP); and population Webster, Daniel West, Kanye West Virginia White Citizens Councils Who Are We? (Huntington) Wilde, Oscar Will, George F. Wilson, Edmund Wilson, James Wilson, Woodrow; Fourteen Points; incorporation rules Wolfe, Alan Wood, Gordon World Happiness Report World War II Wyoming Yemen Yes California Yugoslavia Zenger, John Peter Zimbabwe


pages: 475 words: 149,310

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, David Graeber, Defenestration of Prague, deskilling, disinformation, emotional labour, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global village, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, land tenure, late capitalism, liberation theology, means of production, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-Fordism, post-work, private military company, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Richard Stallman, Slavoj Žižek, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

It dictates for ailing and poor economies a neoliberal formula that includes minimal spending on public welfare, privatization of public industry and wealth, and the reduction of public debt. This formula, which has come to be known as the “Washington Consensus,” has always been criticized from outside and also from within the supranational economic institutions. 89 Some object on economic grounds, for example, to the way that the policies have been applied as an invariable model in different countries without regard for national specificity and without accounting for the relationship between monetary policies and social dynamics. Others object more generally to the political agenda of the Washington Consensus model: a monetary policeman is never neutral and always supports a specific political regime.

On the functioning of law firms in international commerce, see Yves Dezalay, “Multinationales de l’expertise et “dépérissement de l’Etat,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 96-97 (March 1993): 3-20; Marchands de droit: La restructuration de l’ordre juridique international par les multinationales du droit (Paris: Fayard, 1992); and (with Bryant Garth), Dealing in Virtue: International Commercial Arbitration and Construction of a Transnational Legal Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 86 On the concept of “complex sovereignty,” see Kanishka Jayasuriya, “Globalization, Law, and the Transformation of Sovereignty: The Emergence of Global Regulatory Governance,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 6, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 425-55. 87 For IMF voting power figures, see http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/memdir/members.htm. 88 For an interesting view into the culture of the IMF from a sympathetic and well-informed journalist, see Paul Blustein, The Chastening: Inside the Crisis that Rocked the Global Financial System and Humbled the IMF (New York: Public Affairs, 2001). 89 For Joseph Stiglitz’s speeches about the Washington Consensus, see Ha-Joon Chang, ed., Joseph Stiglitz and the World Bank: The Rebel Within (London: Anthem, 2001); and, more generally, Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 2002). See also Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth, “Le ‘Washington Consensus’: Contribution à une sociologie de l’hégémonie du neoliberisme,” Actes de la Recherches en Sciences Sociales, no. 121-22 (March 1998): 3-22. 90 For a detailed history of the World Bank, see Devesh Kapur, John Lewis, and Richard Webb, The World Bank: Its First Half Century, vol. 1: History (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1997). 91 On scarcity and immaterial property, see Christopher May, A Global Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights: The New Enclosures (London: Routledge, 2000), 45. 92 See Donna Haraway, Modest Witness @ Second Millennium (New York: Routledge, 1997), 79-85. 93Diamond v.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Quinn Slobodian has expertly examined the role of neoliberal policies in shaping relations between the Global North and the Global South in the post–World War II era, especially through organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Amy Offner has dissected the impact of these policies on Latin America. And David Harvey was way ahead of everyone else in understanding the contributions of neoliberalism to the so-called Washington Consensus that structured US involvement with the world during neoliberalism’s 1990s heyday. Their work forms a critical backdrop to this study of the neoliberal order in America.10 Generally missing from studies of the international roots and reach of neoliberalism, however, is a reckoning with the Soviet Union and of communism more generally.

The extent to which Clinton’s administration from 1994 forward implemented neoliberal principles is rather stunning. In 1993, in a sign of things to come, Clinton had already signed NAFTA, turning all of North America into a single common market. In 1994, he endorsed the World Trade Organization and its plan to implement neoliberal principles internationally, a project that became known as the “Washington Consensus.” In 1996, Clinton, working with Congress, deregulated the exploding telecommunication industry, now including not just phones and television but the cable and satellite sub-industries so important to the new information economy. Soon after, he did the same with the electrical generation industry that sustained (literally) the new economy.

National governments would have to balance their budgets, and loans to member states would be limited to what they could reasonably hope to repay. These principles converged with those that Robert Rubin had laid down in the United States through his budget agreement of 1993 and later through the Washington Consensus as expressed through the policies of the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. The United States could plausibly claim to be carrying Europe along with its neoliberal revolution. Kohl contemplated aloud the day when a “United States of Europe” would emerge with a scheme for economic and political integration—and a wise blend of market freedom and market discipline—closely modeled on that of the 1990s American republic.82 And yet, neoliberal advances in Britain and the EU also threatened international US financial dominance.


Interventions by Noam Chomsky

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, Monroe Doctrine, no-fly zone, nuremberg principles, old-boy network, Ralph Nader, Thorstein Veblen, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, éminence grise

If a perfectly logical argument leads to a totally insane conclusion, then the problem must lie with the premises, in particular, the rejection of “moral reasons” or “social concerns.” Then follows another task, if Summers is right that such a move can be used against all World Bank proposals for “liberalization”—that is, implementation of the “Washington consensus.” The conclusion seems obvious without spelling it out. It is perhaps of some interest that this reasoning, hardly more than elementary logic, appears to have been ignored within mainstream opinion, neither refuted nor pursued. The modern standard for such questions is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948.

A persuasive explanation for the decline of faith in existing democratic institutions has been offered by Argentine political scientist Atilio Borón, who observed that the new wave of democratization in Latin America coincided with externally mandated economic “reforms” that undermine effective democracy: the neoliberal “Washington consensus,” virtually every element of which undermines democracy, and which has also led to economic disaster in Latin America, as in other regions that rigorously followed the rules. The concepts of democracy and development are closely related in many respects. One is that they have a common enemy: loss of sovereignty.


Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, post-materialism, purchasing power parity, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, special economic zone, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

In two influential books (Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy and especially Why Nations Fail), Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson provided a comprehensive theory that aimed to explain why democracies develop and fail and to demonstrate the close relationship between political and economic inequalities. Their view was very influential, especially in the period before the 2008 global financial crisis, because it unified two strands then dominant in liberal thought: the Washington Consensus (which promoted privatization internally and globalization externally) and the Fukuyama-style celebration of liberal democracy. Difficulty of dealing with communism is widespread One of Acemoglu and Robinson’s central concepts is that of “extractive” institutions: political and economic institutions that are controlled by an elite in order to extract economic resources and concentrate political power, with political and economic power occurring together and reinforcing each other.

Even Chinese official statistics have difficulty dealing with the distinctions, so numerous are the forms of ownership and so many are the different rights of ownership, ranging from the ability to dispose and sell assets to usufruct only. This multitude of ownership and corporate structures was one of the main headaches for the unconditional partisans of the Washington Consensus, who insisted on the importance of clearly defined property rights for growth. It was impossible to fit China, with its scores of different property relationships, into the neoliberal straitjacket. Moreover, some of the most murky types of ownership, like township and village enterprises, registered the most spectacular rates of growth (see Weitzman and Xu 1993).

See also Elite; Rich Urban inequality in China, 100–102, 103 Vanishing American Corporation, The (Davis), 25 Veblen, Thorstein, 17, 171 Vecchi, Michela, 152 Venturini, Francesco, 152 Vietnam: GDP per capita growth rate in, 86–87; growth rate in, 235; increase in economic growth in, 8; political capitalism in, 96, 97; social and national revolutions in, 79–80; support for globalization in, 9 Voltaire, 228 Vonyó, Tamas, 83–84 Vries, Peer, 115 Wage inequality: in China, 102–103; education and, 50 Wage labor outside the home, 189 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 116 Wang Fan-hsi, 81 Wang Hui, 116 Wang Ming, 81 War, global capitalism and, 205–207 War Communism, 69 Warren, Bill, 76, 78, 223 Washington Consensus, 73, 116–117 Wealth: hierarchy and, 177–178; inequality and concentration of, 30–31; inherited, 62–63; intergenerational transmission of, 158–159; liberal meritocratic capitalism and concentration of, 26–31; reduction of concentration of, 216, 217 Wealth and Poverty of Nations, The (Landes), 196 Wealth-income ratio, 27, 30 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 113, 114, 178, 253–254n4 Wealth tax to deconcentrate capital ownership, 48–50 Weber, Max: capitalism of, 176–180; definition of capitalism, 12, 225; on distinction between production and family spheres, 189; on irregular work, 192; on political capitalism, 91, 94; on Protestantism, 254n6 “Weightless” economy, 194–195 Weiss, Yoram, 39 Welfare state: globalization and, 50–55, 155–159; migration and, 52–55, 133 Welfare system, universal basic income and, 203–205 West: malaise about globalization in, 9–10; rise of Asia and end to military, political, and economic superiority of, 6 Western path of development (WPD), 222, 223–224; Third World and, 74, 76, 78–79 When China Rules the World (Jacques), 122 Whig view of history, 68 Wilson, Woodrow, 80, 112 Wolff, Edward, 26, 32 Wootton, David, 227, 253–254n4 Workers, division of net product between owners and, 14–16 World Bank, 127; World Development Report, 202; Worldwide Governance Indicators, 160 World War I, 71, 72, 205–206, 221, 256–257n31 World War II, 205 Worldwide corruption, 159–175; enablers of, 168–170; globalization and, 130–131; imitation of consumption patterns of rich countries and, 170–173; lack of attempts to control, 173–175; limits on, 163–168 Xia, Ming, 92 Xie, Yu, 103 Xi Jinping, 93, 95, 125, 248n41 Xu Caihou, 108–109 Xu Chenggang, 123 Yang, Li, 103–104, 105 Yitzhaki, Shlomo, 33 Zasulich, Vera, 74, 245n6 Zhao Ziyang, 92, 248n39 Zheng He, 122 Zhou, Xiang, 103 “Zone of lawlessness”: China and, 117; in political capitalism, 93 Zucman, Gabriel, 103–104, 161, 168, 169


pages: 684 words: 212,486

Hunger: The Oldest Problem by Martin Caparros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, commoditize, David Graeber, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index fund, invention of agriculture, Jeff Bezos, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, plutocrats, profit maximization, Slavoj Žižek, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%

When independence came, the Europeans took everything they could away with them. In most countries, the situation was difficult: weak infrastructure, few people with any training, lack of capital to invest in any of that—and, of course, political and social conflicts. But everything got worse in 1989 when the Washington Consensus and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) “convinced”—with threats regarding their foreign debt—most African governments to reduce the state’s involvement in certain sectors.3 One of these was agriculture, which continued to be the principal economic activity of a large part of the continent, and the one that fed most of its inhabitants.

There is no light, no water, no streets, no police, no schools. Until the seventies, many governments in what was then the Third World, tried to replace slums with housing projects. Those were the policies before the British economist John Williamson proposed in 1989 what would become known as the Washington Consensus, ten policy points a country would need to follow in order to recover from economic decline. These included fiscal policy discipline, redirection of public spending toward infrastructure development, tax reform, market determined interest rates and deregulated entry, competitive exchange rates, the liberalization of trade, the liberalization of foreign investment, the privatization of state enterprises, oversight of financial institutions, and legal security for private property.

In many countries the policies of the IMF and the World Bank also included the elimination of subsidized food and regulating mechanisms for internal pricing, which their states had implemented through the maintenance of reserves of grain and other food products. In cases such as Niger, the effect was straightforward: thousands of people died from hunger, plain and simple. * * * — The Washington Consensus. How horrible—for a man, for a city—to be inscribed in history with the name of a policy that screwed over so many millions of people. The capitalist offensive of the eighties and nineties also produced a more generalized and significant phenomenon: basic decisions about a country’s economy were made at IMF and World Bank headquarters—in Washington—wresting from national authority almost all their power.


pages: 215 words: 64,460

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics by Michael Kenny, Nick Pearce

battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Khartoum Gordon, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Nixon shock, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, Washington Consensus

Its depth and range suggests a ‘structural multilateral relationship in the Anglosphere, rather than simply bilateral or ad hoc arrangements.’8 From the ‘End of History’ to Iraq In the immediate years after the collapse of Soviet communism, when Francis Fukuyama's contention that liberal-democratic capitalism represented the ‘end of history’, the global dominance of this Anglo-American, liberal economic and political order appeared assured. A long boom, fuelled by global financialisation, was under way. China and India were becoming integrated into the global economy. And some of the leading, disruptive ideologies of the twentieth century – fascism, communism and socialism – had apparently fallen away. The ‘Washington Consensus’ dominated decision-making in the world's economic institutions. American military supremacy was unrivalled. The liberal, free market institutional order appeared to contain no internal contradictions that could threaten it. The prospect of a serious challenge to the Anglo-American West was almost inconceivable.

Trump, Donald Turkey Turnbull, Malcolm United Europe Movement United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) United Nations US Navy USA: Anglo-America concept; ANZUS Pact; Blair's relations with; Bretton Woods agreement (1944); and Brexit; British dominions’ relations with; British future relations with; British migration to; British nineteenth-century relations with; British relations with post Iraq; British twentieth-century relations with; and Europe; Eurosceptic attitude; French attitude; international ambitions; in late nineteenth century; Muslim attitude; and New Right Anglosphere; and nuclear weapons; under Obama; Open Door policy; Powell's attitude; railways; ‘special relationship’ with Britain; Thatcher's relations with; Trump's relations with Britain; in twenty-first century; War on Terror Venezuela Versailles, Treaty of (1919) Vucetic, Srdjan Wales War on Terror Washington Conference (1921–2) Washington Consensus welfare state Wells, H. G. the West: and interventionism; rise of concept West Africa West Germany; see also Germany Willetts, David Wilson, Harold Wootton, Barbara Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) POLITY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT Go to www.politybooks.com/eula to access Polity's ebook EULA.


pages: 409 words: 118,448

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy by Marc Levinson

affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, deindustrialization, endogenous growth, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, intermodal, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, linear programming, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Multi Fibre Arrangement, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working-age population, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The IMF and the World Bank spread the new wisdom that free-market policies would enable the debtor countries to grow at long last, sharply reversing their past positions favoring top-down planning and government-directed investment. Many people in the debtor countries came to the same conclusion, recognizing that state-managed industrialization backed up by import barriers, as advocated for so long by Raúl Prebisch, had failed to bring sustained prosperity. The new market-oriented thinking would become known as the Washington Consensus, a semi-official compendium of principles the experts said would help the developing countries outgrow their debts.22 The experts, their advice framed by the ideological battles over the role of government in Washington and London, failed to recognize that the economic problems of developing countries generally had less to do with high tax rates and Big Government than with large-scale tax avoidance and incompetent government.

In countries where shockingly low literacy rates stood in the way of improving worker productivity, simply rolling back government could not improve the ability of education ministries to provide an adequate education to children for whom private-school tuition was beyond reach. Such shortcomings, ignored by advocates of the Washington Consensus, turned out to be serious drags on developing countries’ economic growth. When it came to surmounting the debt crisis, there was only one poster child: South Korea. The country’s foreign debts were nearly $47 billion at the end of 1985; relative to the size of its economy, it was more indebted than Mexico.

See also Federal Reserve Venezuela, 250–251 Versailles Treaty, 86 Vietnam, 48; hardship in, 44 Vietnam War, 4, 163, 202 Volcker, Paul, 97; Carter and, 220–224; inflation and, 220–221, 223–224, 230; monetary policy of, 221–224; Reagan and, 232, 234; recession under, 224; Third World debt crisis and, 244–245; unemployment and, 224 Volcker shock, 221, 224, 232 Volpe, John, 88 wage controls, 53–54 The Wall Street Journal, 221 Wallich, Henry, 87 Walters, Alan, 176 Washington Consensus, 254 The Washington Post, 71, 96, 104, 223 Watergate scandal, 101, 110, 156 wealth: loss of, and income distribution, 138 Wealth and Poverty (Gilder), 225 welfare state, 133, 143–154, 224, 257; anti-tax movements and, 151–154; birth of, 17–18; budget deficit and, 150; conservative parties and, 24; entitlements and, 157–158; government budget deficits and, 150; growth in cost of, 147–151; income tax and, 145–147, 149–151; oil crisis of 1973, 148; role of government and, 143–145; ungovernability and, 157–158.


pages: 251 words: 69,245

The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic

Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, colonial rule, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Gini coefficient, high net worth, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, open borders, Pareto efficiency, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, Simon Kuznets, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

This Latin America, which reaped so few benefits from Globalization 2.0, is thus not surprisingly the only part of the world that is trying to experiment with alternative policies. By the standards of the past, these alternatives are rather meek, since the differences are not in the substance but in the details. But as the world has, in terms of economic policies followed by different countries, become much more homogeneous, even these small departures from the Washington consensus orthodoxy attract attention. Africa, of course, has remained the third world. But on account of its almost unrelieved misery and relative and often absolute decline during the last quarter of the twentieth century, we may be justified in giving it the unenviable title of the fourth world.

China remains a world apart, with obviously a much higher income today than before but with equally opaque ambitions or rather the same inner ambivalence not only about the role it wants to play internationally but whether it wants a role at all. One of the striking features is that the incredible economic rise of China that was achieved by using a mixture of recipes never seen before, and indeed very different from the recipes (economic policies) advocated by the Washington consensus, has not produced any “codified” rules of economic conduct. There is no attempt to “package” these policies, explain how they might work elsewhere, in other words “sell” a specifically Chinese model of development or economic ideology. Contrast this with the fact that, already by 1776 when the Industrial Revolution was as old as the Chinese “takeoff ” is today, the world had in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations well-codified rules for economic success.


pages: 288 words: 64,771

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

For instance, they have pointed to the decline in antitrust enforcement, financial regulation, legal encouragement of unionization, and taxation of high incomes as key explanations for the explosion of inequality. In one early and influential effort along these lines, Frank Levy and Peter Temin characterized these developments as a shift from the “Treaty of Detroit” to the “Washington Consensus.”17 What this approach misses is the role of government action itself, rather than the government’s mere failure to act, as a cause of inequality. Because of their attachment to the state as an instrument of social justice, those on the left have generally failed to recognize the egalitarian potential of constraints on government power.

See also redistribution of wealth homeownership and, 121–22 land-use and, 110 mortgage lending and, 39 urban areas, 114–15 VA. See Veterans Administration Vergara v. California, 158 Veterans Administration, 39, 41 Vox, 149 Wagner Act, 28 Walker, Jack, 155 Warren, Elizabeth, 135 “Washington Consensus”, 11 wealth inequality. See inequality welfare state, 150–52, 207n35 White House Office of Budget and Management, 164–65 Willig, Robert, 185n8 Winship, Scott, 122 women, 3, 6, 27, 125 Wood, Diane, 169 World War II, 35 Zingales, Luigi, 12 zoning. See also home ownership/housing; land-use concentrated benefits and, 130 economic growth and, 113–23 geographic inequality and, 115–23 property values and, 111 as rent-seeking, 113 restrictions on building and, 123 supply restriction and, 109–13 urban areas and, 114–15 Zuckerberg, Mark, 108


pages: 247 words: 68,918

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

In America, Reagan administration officials preached the gospel of limited government so successfully that by 1996, a Democratic president used his State of the Union address to declare, “The era of big government is over.”15 In the 1980s, Western European governments followed British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s lead in profitably privatizing hugely inefficient state enterprises in energy and power generation (oil, gas, coal, and nuclear), transport (national airlines, railways, and bus companies), and telecommunications. In the 1990s, they preached the virtues of free-market capitalism to their newly liberated Eastern European neighbors and began to integrate them into a single market. Global financial institutions pressed them to embrace U.S.-endorsed liberal economic theories, known collectively as the Washington Consensus.a The results speak for themselves. Between 1980 and 2002, world trade more than tripled. The costs of doing business—especially in transportation and communications—fell sharply. Many protectionist barriers, like tariffs and import quotas, went the way of the Berlin Wall. Tariff rates (as a percentage of total import costs) were halved during this period in America, were more than halved in Europe, and fell by 80 percent in Canada.

Trotsky, Leon Troubled Asset Recovery Program (TARP) Troubled Asset Relief Program troubled assets Tuleyev, Aman Tunisia Turkey Twitter Tymoshenko, Yulia Ukraine Ukraine International Airlines Union Carbide United Arab Emirates United Malays National Organization (UMNO) United Nations United Nations Human Development Report United States Chinese trade with in financial crisis military of in oil embargo oil production in trade by Uzbekistan Vale Venezuela Vietnam von Mises, Ludwig Walmart Warsaw Pact Washington Mutual Wealth of Nations, The (Smith) Webb, Jim Welch, Jack Wen Jiabao Westinghouse Will, George World Bank World Economic Forum World Trade Organization (WTO) World War I World War II Yanukovych, Viktor Yeltsin, Boris Yom Kippur War yuan Yudhoyono, Susilo Bambang Yugoslavia Yukos Oil Company Yushchenko, Viktor Zakaria, Fareed Zhao Ziyang Zhu Rongji Zhu Xinli Zimbabwe Zubkov, Viktor Zuma, Jacob Zyuzin, Igor a The Washington Consensus comprises three major ideas: fiscal and budgetary discipline; a market economy, including property rights, competitive exchange rates, privatization, and deregulation; and openness to the global economy through liberalization of trade and foreign direct investment. b Even in Costa Rica, which has no armed forces, the government operates a Ministry of Public Security that oversees a Civil Force, a kind of special police force devoted to combating drug trafficking and other crimes.


pages: 413 words: 119,379

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth by Tom Burgis

Airbus A320, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Livingstone, I presume, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, purchasing power parity, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Inherent in the praise that is heaped on Ghana is a troubling undertone that mitigated penury is the best that Africans can aim for. Like the rest of Africa’s resource states, Ghana bowed to the orthodoxy that the World Bank and the IMF imposed from the early 1980s in the form of ‘structural adjustment programmes’. Based on a set of neoliberal economic policies known as the Washington Consensus, these programmes made loans to poor countries dependent on their adherence to strict conditions, including deep cuts to public spending, privatizing state-owned assets, and lifting controls on trade. Foreign investment was deemed essential to economic growth. African and other poor countries were exhorted to bend over backward with tax breaks and other incentives in order to attract multinational corporations.

It was not just the World Bank that found its influence in Africa’s resource states diminished. The IMF, its sister institution charged with maintaining the stability of the world financial system, already had a bad reputation in Africa, with reformers and kleptocrats alike, for imposing the strictures of the Washington Consensus, under which African states had become test tubes for the unfettered free-market philosophy that would also beget the subprime crisis and subsequent near-collapse of the Western banking system. Emil Salim’s review of the World Bank’s record in the oil and mining industries reported that, in the cases it had studied, ‘the IMF’s approach to the extractive sectors was mainly one that promoted aggressive privatization of significant mining and hydrocarbon assets for short-term financing of the [government’s budget] deficit.

See Diakité, Aboubacar Touré, Mamadie with Cilins in Florida, 103–105, 109, 125–126, 127 Guinea’s minerals and, 103–105, 109, 110, 124, 125–126, 127 Transfer pricing, 166 Transparency International, 17 Trendfield company, 140–141, 144 Trump, Donald, 246 Tsvangirai, Morgan, 219, 223, 237 Turner, Bill, 39–40 Tutsi/Hutu conflict and aftermath, 30–31, 32, 40–41, 43–44, 45–46, 55, 56 Tutu, Desmond, Archbishop, 66 Uba, Andy, 77, 193 Ukraine, 147, 242 Umunna, Hillary, 64–65 Vale mining and Guinea, 104, 108, 123–124, 128, 129–130 Varma, Somit, 163–164 Vicente, Manuel background, 10–11, 19 business empire, 23, 99 China Sonangol/Queensway Group and, 26, 94, 95, 96–97, 98, 100, 114, 119 Futungo and, 10–11, 12, 97, 111 oil and, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18–19, 25, 26, 94, 95, 96–97, 98, 100, 114, 119 poverty in Angola and, 20, 208 Vines, Alex, 100 ‘VIP’ (‘Vagabond in Power’/Nneka), 246–247 Voser, Peter, 194 ‘Vultures’ (Achebe), 208 Wang Xiangfei, 90–91, 92–93 Wase, Abdullahi, 182 Washington Consensus, 163, 171 Wolfensohn, James, 157, 171 Wolfowitz, Paul, 170 World Bank Africa/African countries and, 57–58, 65, 136, 151–152, 163–164 BRICS nations vs., 218 China credit vs., 137, 170, 171 criticism of, 3, 151–152, 157–159, 160, 161, 164, 170, 171 description/staff, 169–170 ‘extreme poverty’/poor countries, 4 IFC and, 153, 154, 156 Miga and, 158–161 reputation/influence, 169–170 role/methods, 144, 151, 153, 154, 157, 165, 170 Salim’s criticism/recommendations, 157–159, 160, 161, 164, 170, 171 structural adjustment programmes, 162–163, 171 See also International Finance Corporation (IFC) World Trade Organization (WTO), 81, 157, 239 Wu Yang, 93, 98, 101–102, 145, 193 Xi Jinping, 23 Xia Huang, 134–135, 148, 149 Xueming Li (pseudonym), 91 Yar’Adua, Umaru health problems/death, 72, 73, 77, 78, 79, 183–184, 189, 201, 202, 203 as Katsina governor, 68 presidential campaign/as president, 69, 72, 77–78, 179, 202 Zambia, 4, 34, 56, 163, 165, 225 Zeng Peiyan, 86–87, 94, 99 Zibi, Songezo, 217 Zimbabwe diamonds/effects, 220–223, 226, 235–236 ‘indigenization’ of mining industry/corruption, 230–232 Marange massacre/Operation No Return, 220–221, 222, 226, 235, 236 minerals (overview), 231 Mugabe’s security forces/CIO, 223, 226, 234–236, 237, 243 Pa/Queensway Group and, 223, 230, 234, 235–236, 237–238, 243 See also specific companies/organizations; specific individuals Ziv, Israel, 117 Zuks, Nik, 143–144 Zuma, Jacob, 217–218 About the Publisher Australia HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty.


pages: 708 words: 176,708

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire by Wikileaks

affirmative action, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, energy transition, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, F. W. de Klerk, facts on the ground, failed state, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, high net worth, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Northern Rock, nuclear ambiguity, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game, éminence grise

This is a testament to the extent of economic interpenetration that has already developed, and the extent to which the rest of the world depends upon the US economy. It is also a very good reason why, after the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, the US can still lead a wide coalition of states as it presses for further entrenchment of the “Washington Consensus.” The dominance of Wall Street is reminiscent of British domination of world trade in the nineteenth century, in that US interests have in a way become synonymous with those of the world. If it goes down, we all go down. This eBook is licensed to Edward Betts, edward@4angle.com on 04/01/2016 Part II This eBook is licensed to Edward Betts, edward@4angle.com on 04/01/2016 4.

In September 2005, the new US ambassador to Ecuador, Linda Jewell, reiterated the embassy’s concerns about an unintended loss of US influence in Ecuador, in a cable titled: “Democracy Promotion Strategies for Ecuador.”48 As this cable illustrates, so-called “democracy promotion” is a strategy by which Western governments seek to influence and contain political and economic change in countries of strategic importance. In Ecuador, the US wanted to counteract the influence of Latin America’s burgeoning social movements. Demanding democratic reforms and an economic alternative to the Washington consensus, these movements had brought left-wing leaders to power in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Uruguay. The embassy feared that the “pink tide” would engulf Ecuador, damaging US business interests in the country and dashing any hopes of negotiating a free-trade agreement. Moreover, the Ecuadorians who had mobilized against Gutiérrez were calling for an end to US interference in Ecuador and closure of the US Forward Operating Base at Manta.

While soft US methods of intervention helped maintain right-wing, Washington-friendly political parties in power during the period of democratization of the 1990s, beginning in 1998 a tide of left-leaning candidates began winning elections, from the southern tip of South America to El Salvador. By 2009, the vast majority of Latin Americans—who had experienced an unprecedented economic growth failure for more than two decades6 under governments that adhered to the neoliberal “Washington Consensus”—were living under governments that explicitly rejected many of these policies. This chapter will examine the actions, recommendations, and observations of US diplomats in five countries, four of which saw left-wing political governments elected to power, and one of which experienced a US-backed coup that was followed by political violence and repression.


pages: 662 words: 180,546

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

But an equal moiety of blame should be dished out to their opponents on the left, who often bandy about attributions of “neoliberalism” as a portmanteau term of abuse when discussing grand phenomena often lumped together under the terminology of “globalization” and “financialization” and “governmentality.” The Washington Consensus, the death of the welfare state, the risk society, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, European (dis)integration, the ascendancy of China, and the outsourcing of manufacturing all portend cosmic themes, mostly of interest to those who regard themselves of taking the broad view of power politics.4 But broad characterizations of contemporary political events should not be mistaken for the painstaking construction of political doctrines to motivate organization in the long run, however much they may be related.

It was never supported by economic theory. Nor, it should now be clear, is it supported by historical experience. Learning this lesson may be the silver lining in the cloud now hanging over the global economy.15 In an interview with the Berliner Zeitung, Stiglitz was quoted as saying, “Neoliberalism like the Washington Consensus is dead in most western countries. See the debates in South America or other countries. The U.S. has lost its role as the model for others. Everyone only laughs when U.S. technocrats give lectures in other countries and say: ‘Do as we do, liberalize your financial markets!’”16 Stiglitz, as one of the few neoclassical economists who has periodically attempted to intellectually refute neoliberalism over the course of his career, should therefore be regarded as someone who had significant credibility tied up in expressing his conviction that the demise of neoliberalism was at hand.

The role of such transnational organizations was recast to exert “lock-in” of prior neoliberal policies, and therefore to restrict the range of political options of national governments. Sometimes they were also used to displace indigenous “crony capitalists” with a more cosmopolitan breed of cronyism. Thus it is correct to observe an organic connection between such phenomena as the Washington Consensus and the spread of neoliberal hegemony, as Dieter Plehwe argues.99 This also helps address the neoliberal conundrum of how to both hem in and at the same time obscure the strong state identified in point 4, above. The relevance of the rise of the neoliberal globalized financial regime to the crisis is a matter of great concern to the thought collective and to others (such as Ben Bernanke) who seek to offload responsibility for the crash onto someone else.


Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kondratiev cycle, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, law of one price, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, long and variable lags, low interest rates, market clearing, market friction, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, placebo effect, post-war consensus, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, value at risk, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-sum game

As Stedman Jones notes for Britain: The major differences, and the real departure in economic terms, between the Callaghan government and the Conservatives lay in [the latter’s] radicalization of microeconomic policy through various market-based supply-side reforms and their importation of market mechanisms into public service provision, something the Labour Party continued and deepened after 1997. 56 197 T h e R i s e , T r i u m p h a n d Fa l l of K e y n e s The new orthodoxy’s structural reform ideas spread across the world in the form of the ‘Washington consensus’ that, through the IMF and the World Bank, made the receipt of financial support conditional on the deregulation of financial sectors, the privatization of state-owned enterprises, the liberalization of markets and fiscal discipline. The revolution in theory initiated by Friedman and Lucas ran in parallel with another theoretical enterprise particularly relevant to policy, known as the ‘economics of politics’.

., 179 Erie Canal, 90 Eshag, Eprime, 71 European Central Bank, 139, 188, 198, 217, 242–3, 253, 254, 361 institutional constraints on, 50, 234, 242, 249, 274–5 misreading of Eurozone crisis, 275 quantitative easing (QE) by, 273–4 on ‘stress testing’, 364 taxing of ‘excess’ reserves, 266 use of LTROs, 257 European Commission, 139, 3612, 365 European Exchange Rate Mechanism, 188 European Investment Bank, 354 European Union (EU, formerly EEC), 153, 318, 379, 383 Financial Stability Board (FSB), 363 ‘Four Freedoms’, 375 lack of state, 376 Single Resolution Board, 365 Eurozone current account imbalances, 333, 334, 335, 336–7, 341–2 Juncker investment programme, 274 proposed European Monetary Fund, 376, 382 structural flaw in, 341, 375–7 two original sins of, 274, 376–5 Eurozone debt crisis (2010–12), 50, 223, 377, 382 and double-dip recession, 241, 242–3, 274 ECB’s misreading of, 275 and financial crowding-out theory, 234 and Greece, 32, 224, 224–5, 226, 233, 235, 242–3, 243, 365 and ‘troika’, 32, 139, 243 469 i n de x exchange-rate policy, 127–8, 139 and Congdon’s ‘real balance effect’, 285 and domestic interest rates, 251 fixed rates under Bretton Woods, 16, 159, 161, 162, 168 floating rates from 1970s, 16–17, 184 and Friedman, 182 IMF ‘scarce currency’ clause, 380–81 Nixon’s dollar devaluation (1971), 153, 154, 165 and quantitative easing, 267, 267 sterling crisis (1951), 145 sterling devaluation (November 1967), 152 sterling-dollar peg (from 1949), 148, 150, 152 sterling/franc/deutschmark devaluations (1949), 152 ‘Triffin paradox’, 161, 165 ‘expansionary fiscal consolidation’, 192, 225, 231 Fabian socialism, 96 Fama, Eugene, 208, 311–12, 313 Fanny Mae, 217, 256, 309, 320 fascism, 13, 98, 131, 175 Federal Reserve, US and 2008 crash, 50, 217, 254, 256 AIG bail-out (2008), 325 Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), 185–6 and Great Depression, 104–6 inflation targeting, 188 and monetarism, 185–6, 188 monetary policy in 1950s, 146 ‘Operation Twist’, 268 quantitative easing (QE) by, 256–7, 273–4 ‘Reserve Position Doctrine’ (1920s), 103–4 and under-consumption theory, 298 Ferguson, Niall, 73, 79, 80, 91 financial collapse (2007–8) acute phase, 218–20, 223 ‘Austrian’ explanation, 104, 303 banks as proximate cause, 343, 361, 365 Bear Stearns rescue, 217 British analogies with Greece, 235 British debate after, 225–8 causes of, 3–4, 343–4, 365, 366, 368 central bank responses, 3, 217, 219, 234–5, 253–4, 254, 256–8, 359 comparative recovery patterns, 241–4, 242, 273, 273–4 compared to 1929 crash, 218 Conservative narrative, 226–8, 229–31, 233, 234–5, 237–9 and crisis of conservative economics, 17 and embedded leverage, 318, 322, 325 five distinct stages of crisis, 216–19 ‘global imbalances’ explanation, 11, 331, 333, 336–43, 337 government responses, 3, 217–18, 219–20, 221–36, 237–47 Hayekian view of cause, 303 hysteresis after, 239–41, 240, 241, 370 inequality as deeper cause of, 299–306, 368 Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, 3, 50, 217, 365 leverage (debt to equity) ratios on eve of, 317–18 liquidity-solvency confusion, 317 outbreaks of populism following, 13, 371–3, 376, 383 post-crash deficit, 226–33, 229, 237–8 private debt as proximate cause, 3–4 470 i n de x stagnation of real earnings as deep cause, 4, 303, 367 standard account of origins of, 3–4 as test of two theories, 2–3, 76 theoretical and policy responses, 10, 129, 219–20, 223–36, 237–47 see also austerity policy and under-consumption theory, 303–6 US sub-prime mortgage market, 3, 216, 304–5, 309, 323, 328, 341 see also Great Recession (2008–9) Financial Services Authority, U K, 321–2, 330 financial system and causes of 2008 collapse, 3, 4–5, 253, 307–9, 361 and crisis of conservative economics, 17 deregulation, 307–9, 310–16, 318–22, 328, 332–3, 384 East Asian financial crisis (1997–8), 202, 339, 371, 382 ‘Efficient Market Hypothesis’ (EMH), 311–13, 321–2, 328, 388 ‘financialization’ of the economy, 5, 305, 307–9, 366–7 fraud and criminality, 3, 4, 5, 7, 328, 350, 365–6, 367 and free-market orthodoxy, 5, 308–16 loosening of moral restraints, 319 mark-to-market (M2M) framework, 314 offshore euro-dollar market, 308, 332 privatised gain and socialised loss, 319–20 released from national regulation (1980s/90s), 131, 318–22 structural power of finance, 6–7, 14, 309 systemic under-estimation of risk, 314–16, 316*, 320–22, 323, 329–30 Thatcher’s Big Bang (1980s), 319 tradable public debt instruments, 43, 80–81 Turner’s ‘financial intensity’ concept, 366 unrealism of assumptions, 310–16 value at risk (VaR) framework, 314–15, 315, 330 ‘Washington consensus’ deregulation, 198, 200 see also banks FinTech, 356 First World War, 86, 95, 106–7, 374, 375 ‘fiscal consolidation’, 10–11, 129, 225 Darling’s plan (2009), 225–6 ‘expansionary’, 192, 225, 231 and Osborne, 227–8, 229–30, 231, 233, 237–9, 243–4, 244, 245 fiscal policy and 2008 collapse, 10, 217–18, 219–20, 223–36, 265–6, 273–4, 286 ‘Barber boom’, 167, 168 during Blair-Brown years, 221–4, 223, 225–6, 227 British experience (1692–2012), 77 Congdon’s total rejection of, 280, 285–6 ‘crowding out’ argument, 83–4, 109–11, 226, 233–5 current and capital spending, 107–8, 114, 142, 155–6, 193, 221–3, 237–8, 355–7 directing flow of new spending, 286–7 fiscal multiplier, 110–11, 125–6, 133–6, 138, 230–31, 233, 235, 244–5 471 i n de x fiscal policy – (cont.) in inter-war Britain, 106–17 and Keynesian economics, 2–3, 109, 111, 114–17, 125–7, 129–31, 133–4, 137–8, 173, 278 Keynesian full employment phase (1945–60), 141–8 Krugman’s ‘confidence fairy’, 117 Lawson counterrevolution, 185, 192–3, 222, 358 legacy of monetarism, 190–93 May Committee (1931), 112 national income accounts, 138 New Classical view of, 200 in new macroeconomic constitution, 351–2, 355–7, 360–61 nineteenth-century theory of, 9, 29 post-Keynesian disablement of, 193, 221, 258, 304, 328 pre-crash orthodoxy, 221–2, 223–4, 230–31 Public Sector Borrowing Requirement (PSBR), 155–6 see also balanced budget theory; public investment; taxation Fisher, Irving, 9, 52, 61, 99, 280 ‘compensated dollar’ scheme, 66 equation of exchange, 62–4, 71–2, 258, 278–9, 283, 284, 287 QTM formulation, 62–7, 71–2 and quantitative easing, 258, 278–9 Santa Claus money, 62–4, 258, 278–9 Fitch (CR A), 329 France assignats in 1790s, 64–5 and gold standard, 50, 102, 104, 127 ‘indicative planning’ system, 150 ‘physiocrats’in, 81 protectionism in late nineteenthcentury, 59 state holding companies, 356 statism in, 140, 144 university campus revolts (1968), 164 Freddie Mac, 217, 256, 309, 320 free trade, xviii, 9, 58–9, 76, 79, 81–2 abandoned in Britain (1932), 113 general presumption in favour of, 377 and Hume’s ‘price-specie-flow’ mechanism, 37–8, 53, 54, 104, 332 and Irish potato famine, 15 List’s ‘infant industry’ argument, 88–9, 90, 378–7 and nationalist–globalist split, 371–3 and post-war liberalization, 16, 374 and presumption of peace, 379 repeal of Corn Laws (1846), 15, 85 Ricardo’s doctrine of comparative advantage, 88, 378, 379, 379 US conversion to (1940s), 90 Freiburg School, 140 Friedman, Milton adaptive expectations theory, 180–81, 183, 194, 206–11 and Cartesian distinction, 22 as Fisher’s heir, 278 The Great Contraction (with Schwartz; 1865), 105 idea of ‘helicopter money’, 63 and monetary base, 185, 280 and Mont Pelerin Society, 176–7 and ‘natural’ rate of unemployment, 163, 177, 181, 195, 206, 208 onslaught on Keynesianism, 170, 174, 177–83, 261 ‘permanent income hypothesis’ (1957), 178, 183 and Phillips Curve, 38, 180–81, 194, 206–8, 207 472 i n de x policy implications of work of, 182–3 political motives of, 177, 183–4 and quantity theory, 61, 70, 177–9, 182, 183, 194 ‘stable demand function for money’, 179 view of Great Depression, 104–6, 179, 183, 256, 276, 278 weaknesses in arguments of, 183 Frydman, Roman, 389 Fullarton, John, 49 Funding for Lending programme, 265–6 G20 Financial Stability Board, 363 summits (2009/10), 219–20, 223, 225 G7 finance ministers meeting (February 2010), 224–5 Galbraith, James, 303, 361 game theorists, 389 Gasperin, Simone, 357* Geddes, Sir Eric, 108 German Historical School, 88–9 Germany and 2008 crash, 217, 218, 243 current account surplus, 333, 334, 341, 342, 380, 381 employer–union bargains, 147, 167 and Eurozone crisis, 341, 365, 376, 377 and Great Depression, 97, 111, 129–30 growth Keynesianism (1960–70), 153–4 high growth rates in 1950/60s, 149, 156 Hitler’s reduction in unemployment, 111, 112, 129–30 hyperinflation of early 1920s, 275 as Keynesian in 1960s, 140 nineteenth-century expansion and unification, 89, 91 ‘ordo-liberalism’ in, 140 post-war modernization/catch-up, 156–7 protectionism in late nineteenthcentury, 59 return to gold standard (1924), 102 ‘Rhenish capitalism’ model, 154 Giffen, Robert, 51 Giles, Chris, 219, 302 Gini coefficient, 299, 300 Gladstone, William, 42–3, 86 Glass–Steagall Act (1933), 319, 361, 362 global imbalances basic theory of, 335–6 and capital account liberalization, 318–19 capital flight, 59, 334, 337, 341, 343 Eurozone see Eurozone: current account imbalances as explanation for 2007–8 crash, 11, 331, 333, 336–43, 337 and financial deregulation, 318–19, 332–3 and First World War, 95 increases in pre-crash years, 333, 333–4, 334, 335 problematic nature of, 333–4 reserve accumulation, 336, 337–41 ‘saving glut’ vs ‘money’ glut, 338–41, 342 structural causes still in place, 344 US dollar as main reserve currency, 338 global warming, 383 globalization, 17, 300, 334–5 absence of the state, 350, 373, 375–6 anti-globalist movements, 371–2, 373 first age of, 51, 55, 57, 59, 374, 375 473 i n de x globalization – (cont.) future of, 382–4 Geneva and Seattle protests (1998/99), 371 and inflation rate, 252–3 and lower wages in developed world, 252–3, 300, 379 nationalist-globalist split, 371–3 ‘neo-liberal’ agenda of IMF, 139, 181, 318–19 popular protest against, 351, 371–2 resurgence of after Cold War, 374 Rodrik’s ‘impossible trinity’, 375 gold, 23, 24, 25, 28, 35, 37 new gold production, 51, 52, 55, 62 gold standard, xviii, 1, 9, 27, 29, 338 and Britain, 9, 42, 43, 44, 45–50, 53, 57–9, 80, 101, 102, 113 collapse of US exchange standard (1971), 160, 165 commitment to convertibility, 55–6 and Cunliffe model, 54–5, 102 depressions in later nineteenthcentury, 51–2 dysfunctional after First World War, 95, 97 final suspension in Britain (1931), 113, 125 Fisher’s ‘compensated dollar’ scheme, 66 Hume’s ‘price-specie-flow’ mechanism, 37–8, 53, 54, 104, 285, 332 and international bond markets, 92 as international by 1880s, 50–52 Keynes on, 58, 101, 127 Kindleberger thesis, 58–9 move to ‘managed’ system, 71, 99–100 replaces silver standard (1690s), 42, 43 restored (1821), 48 return to in 1920s, 102, 104, 107 suspension during Napoleonic wars, 43, 45–7 suspension of convertibility (1919), 101–2 triumph of by mid-nineteenthcentury, 44, 50 working and design of, 52–9 as working in tandem with empire, 57, 58 Goldberg, Michael D., 389 Goldman Sachs, 315 Goodhart, Charles, 168, 187 Graeber, David, 28 Great Depression (1929–32), 9, 13, 96, 97–8, 110–13, 127 compared to 2008 crash, 218 Friedman-Schwartz view, 104–6, 179, 183, 256, 276, 278 impact on US policy-makers in 2008 period, 256, 275, 278 left-wing explanations of, 298 rise in inequality in lead-up to, 289 and second wave of collectivism, 15–16 Great Moderation (early 1990s–2007), 4, 53, 202, 278 economic problems during, 348 financial deregulation during, 318–22, 328 financial innovation during, 322–8 and independent central banks, 215 inflation during, 106, 215, 216, 252–3, 253, 348, 359, 360 international financial network, 309, 318–28 output growth during, 215, 253, 348 Great Recession (2008–9), xviii Congdon’s view of, 281–2, 287 co-ordinated global response, 219–20, 383 decline in productivity after, 305–6 474 i n de x initial signs of recovery (2009), 218–19, 225, 226 monetary interpretation of, 105, 106 ‘premature withdrawal’ of fiscal stimulus, 219–20, 223–36, 245, 352 reform agenda after, 361–8 rise in inequality in lead-up to, 289–90, 299–300 see also financial collapse (2007–8) Greece and Eurozone debt crisis, 32, 224, 224–5, 226, 233, 235, 242–3, 243, 337, 341, 365 in gold standard era, 59 Greenspan, Alan, 188, 313 Hamilton, Alexander, 88, 90, 92 Hammond, Philip, 236, 352 Hannover Re scandal, 329 Harrison, George, 105 Harrod, Roy, 123 Harvey, John, 333, 387 Hawtrey, Ralph, 109–10, 280 Hayek, Friedrich, 33, 46, 177, 195, 350, 367 founds Mont Pelerin Society, 176 ‘over-consumption’ theory, 296 The Road to Serfdom (1944), 16, 175–6 on Wall Street Crash, 104 Heath, Edward, 167–8 Heckscher, Eli, 37 Help to Buy programme, 265, 266 Henderson, Hubert, 109 Henderson, W.

., 171, 208 Napoleonic wars, 43, 45–8, 80, 81, 84 national debt and 2007–8 crash, 76, 217–18, 219–20, 223–4, 224, 225–36, 237 British experience (1692–2012), 77 British long-term securities, 43 ‘burden on future generations’ fallacy, 236 bust at end of Lawson boom, 193 in eighteenth-century Britain, 80–81 four big spikes (since 1815), 84 and ‘Geddes Axe’ (1920s), 108 Alexander Hamilton on, 92 international bond markets, 90–92, 235 in Keynesian era, 156, 159–60, 161 Merkel’s ‘Swabian housewife’, 236 and modern tax systems, 32 monetary financing of deficits, 246–7, 285 during Napoleonic wars, 45–8 nineteenth-century money lenders, 90–91, 332 ‘off-budget’ accounting, 108–9 and PFI, 222–3 post-crash deficit, 226–33, 229, 237–9, 328, 352 public sector net borrowing (PSNB), 185, 227–8, 237, 238 Reagan’s budget deficits, 186, 190–91 recession of early 1980s, 186–7, 191 sinking fund, 83, 84, 85, 106, 108, 112, 114, 355 Sinking Fund Act (1875), 114 Smith and Ricardo’s view, 81–2, 83–4, 109, 110 ‘structural’ or ‘cyclically-adjusted’ deficit, 237–41, 238 US in 1950s/60s, 159–60, 161 Victorian fiscal constitution, 85–8, 86 and warfare, 83 483 i n de x nationalism, 17, 92, 95, 351, 371–3, 375 nationalization, 15–16, 142, 158 during 2008 crisis, 217 Labour’s renationalization proposals, 356 naval power, 78, 79–80, 87 Navigation Acts, British, 78 neo-classical economics tradition, xviii and 2008 collapse, 310–16, 328 comparisons with Keynesian view, 204, 204 and deregulation of banking, 310–11 distribution in perfect markets of, 292 formula for multiplier, 134–6 and Friedman, 177–83 and growth in inequality, 245–6 in Hutchison’s continua, 349 and Keynes, 122–3, 128 Keynesian synthesis, 172, 173–4, 201–2 microeconomics of Walras, 10, 173, 181, 385 model of rationality, 120 ‘natural’ rate of unemployment, 2, 163, 195, 197, 208, 232–3 and New Consensus, 199 and ‘optimal’ rate of investment, 368 pivotal role of banks ignored, 311 Solow growth model, 293 theoretical abolition of Keynesianism, 201 wage-adjustment story, 107, 108, 115, 121–2, 123, 128, 130, 132, 172 see also classical economics tradition; New Classical economics neo-liberal ideology ‘anti-state’ deception of, 93 capture of politics by, 6, 16–17, 292 and Eurozone constitution, 274 and Eurozone design flaw, 376, 377 implosion of growth model, 305 need for jettisoning of, 351, 367 term coined by Rustow (1938), 175 totalitarianism as original target, 175–6 as unchallenged since Cold War, 374 Netherlands, 78 New Classical economics and 2008 collapse, 2–3, 5 DSGE modelling, 196, 211–12 and erroneous austerity arguments, 232–4 and growth in inequality, 4 inflation targeting, 2 and microeconomics of Walras, 10 ‘natural’ rate of unemployment, 2, 195, 197, 208, 232–3 New Classical economics – (c0nt.) and neo-liberal capture of politics, 6, 16–17 and policies of austerity, 3 pre-crash models/mindset of 2000s, 212–13, 221, 229–35, 310–16 REH as analytic core of, 194–7, 385–6 synthesis with New Keynesians, 195–7, 199–201, 202 and unimpeded financial markets, 5, 6–7 unrealism of assumptions, 200, 310–16, 321–2 victory of in 1970s, 16–17 New Consensus, 9, 196–8, 202 based on supply not demand, 200 Brown constitution, 221–3 main features of, 199–201 primacy of monetary policy, 200–201, 212 ‘Washington consensus’, 198 484 i n de x New Keynesianism, 195–7, 199, 200, 201, 202, 212, 358 Brown constitution, 221–3, 227 and inflation targeting, 196, 251 ‘new stagnation’ theorists, 151 New Zealand, 188 Newton, Isaac, 42, 43, 47–8 Nielsen, Robert, 389 Niemeyer, Sir Otto, 108 Nixon, Richard, 153, 162 Norman, George, 49 Norman, Montagu, 115 North, Douglass, 198–9 Northern Rock, 317, 319*, 362 Obama, Barack, 225, 241–2, 274 O’Brien, Denis, 78 Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR), 228, 229–30, 237 oil prices, 271, 272 oil price shock (1973–4), 166–7, 189, 190 price spike (1980–82), 189, 190 OPEC surpluses, 308, 332 Orbán, Viktor, 373 Osborne, George, 114, 227–8, 229, 231, 233 and cost of austerity, 243–4, 244, 245 crucial mistake in austerity policy, 229–30 ‘deficit’ obsession of, 237 and Reinhart-Rogoff work, 232 and ‘structural’ deficit, 237–9 output gaps, 144, 197, 212–13, 229, 235, 237, 258, 286 ‘over-consumption’ theory, Austrian, 296 Overstone, Lord, 49 Palley, Thomas, 302–3, 304, 305 Papandreou (Greek Prime Minister), 324 Pareto-efficiency, 290, 291 Paulson, Henry, 217 Peel, Robert, 47–8, 86 Péreire brothers, 91 Pettifor, Ann, 246, 309 Pettis, Michael, 339 Petty, William, 28 Phillips, A.


pages: 232 words: 77,956

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else by James Meek

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, call centre, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, electricity market, Etonian, Ford Model T, gentrification, HESCO bastion, housing crisis, illegal immigration, land bank, Leo Hollis, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-industrial society, pre–internet, price mechanism, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor

Few doubted Saddam would be beaten, and he was. That November, as I drove off the ferry at Ostend, heading east, it seemed a racing, expanding tide of victorious free marketism flickered at my wheels, a tide that has gone by many names – consumer capitalism, Reaganism, Thatcherism, neoliberalism, the Washington Consensus. Though the watchtowers still stood at the old border between two Germanys, the border was gone. In eastern Germany, the narrow cobbled streets of medieval towns had jammed solid with second hand cars. I passed a field where an impatient western German DIY chain, unwilling to wait for steel and breeze blocks, had erected a vast, circular retail marquee, blazing with lights.

They seemed to believe, or talked, made speeches, wrote papers as if they believed, that the entire structure of their own wealthy modern societies – the roads, the electricity grids, the railways, the water and sewage systems, the universal postal services, the telecoms networks, housing, education and health care – had been brought into being by individual entrepreneurs driven by desire for gain, with the occasional lump of charity thrown in, and that a bloated, parasitical state had come shambling onto the scene, seizing assets and demanding free stuff for its shirker buddies. I don’t want to absolve the Russians or Ukrainians of responsibility for their handling of the aftermath of communism, but the template they were handed by the fraternity of the Washington Consensus was based on fake history. If this is what the triumphalists of Wall Street and the City of London told the Russians about the way of the capitalist world, I thought when I moved back to Britain in 1999, what have they been telling us? And what came of it? When Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives came to power in Britain in 1979, much of the economy, and almost all its infrastructure, was in state hands.


Chomsky on Mis-Education by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, disinformation, dual-use technology, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, means of production, military-industrial complex, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

The point is elementary and applies to the self-designated “gatekeeper and model” as well. Latin America is the obvious testing ground, particularly the Central America–Caribbean region. Here Washington has faced few external challenges for almost a century, so the guiding principles of policy, and of today’s neoliberal “Washington consensus,” are revealed most clearly when we examine the state of the region and how that came about. It is of some interest that the exercise is rarely undertaken and, if proposed, castigated as extremist or worse. I leave it as an “exercise for the reader,” merely noting that the record teaches useful lessons about the political and economic principles that are to be “the wave of the future.”

The well-known economic historian Paul Bairoch points out that “there is no doubt that the Third World’s compulsory economic liberalism in the nineteenth century is a major element in explaining the delay in its industrialization,” or even “deindustrialization,” while Europe and the regions that managed to stay free of its control developed by radical violation of these principles.46 Referring to the more recent past, Arthur Schlesinger’s secret report on Kennedy’s Latin American mission realistically criticized “the baleful influence of the International Monetary Fund,” then pursuing the 1950s version of today’s “Washington Consensus” (“structural adjustment,” “neoliberalism”). Despite much confident rhetoric, not much is understood about economic development. But some lessons of history seem reasonably clear and not hard to understand. Let us return to the prevailing doctrine that “America’s victory in the Cold War” was a victory for democracy and the free market.


pages: 193 words: 63,618

The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich by Ndongo Sylla

"there is no alternative" (TINA), British Empire, carbon footprint, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, degrowth, Doha Development Round, Food sovereignty, global value chain, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, labour mobility, land reform, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

On the other hand, he argues, it is undeniable that the developing countries that most benefited from the gains of globalisation are those that introduced heterodox and gradualist economic policies in their approaches towards economic openness. Still, according to him, empirical data also showed that the vast majority of developing countries which, in recent history, followed the neoliberal orthodoxy, the notorious ‘Washington Consensus’, have had disastrous economic performances (see Box 3.2). In other words, neoliberal criticism of Fair Trade is rather weak from a logical point of view. On the one hand, it cannot attack consumer choices without contradicting its support of the sacred principle of individual freedom. On the other, it cannot argue that it represents a better economic 73 Sylla T02779 01 text 73 28/11/2013 13:04 the fair trade scandal alternative a priori than the model promoted by Fair Trade, because its economic and social results so far are certainly not persuasive.

., 132, 156(n4) Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, Bird-friendly Coffee programme, 54 Social capital, 101, 117, 119 Solidaridad, 3, 38–9, 114; see also Roozen Solomon Islands, 135 Somalia, 135 SOS Wereldhandel; see Fair Trade Organisatie Spaghetti bowl, 27 South Africa, 136, 137, 159(n20), 162(n21) South South relations, 80, 149, 163(n2) Sri Lanka, 134 STABEX, see Export earnings stabilisation system Starbucks, 77, 78, 150; Coffee and farmer equity practices, 55 Stigler, Georges, 42 Stiglitz, Joseph E. and Charlton, Andrew, 31–3, 66 Structural adjustment policies, 17, 18, 42 Structuralist school, 37–8 Sudan, 135 Sugar, 16, 27, 30, 36, 60–2, 80, 85, 90 Sustainable Agriculture Network, 53 Sustainability, 4, 24, 34, 47, 50, 53, 55, 56, 57, 70, 79, 113, 138, 142, 149–50, 158(n5) Sustainable development, 4, 34, 47, 55, 70, 82, 83, 156(n2), 163(n1) Sustainable Fair Trade Management System, 45; see also World Fair Trade Organization Sweden, 63, 162(n29) Switzerland, 53, 127, 128 System for Minerals (Sysmin), 155(n2) Taiwan, 155(n1) Tanzania, United Republic of, 134, 135 Tariff escalation, 26–8, 30 Tariff peaks, 30 Tax havens, 157(n13) Tea, 40, 49, 52, 53, 54, 56, 80, 130, 133, 134, 136 Ten Thousand Villages, 35–6 Thailand, 155(n1) Thatcher, Margaret, 42 Third Worldism, 36–40, 120 Times (the), 160(n2) Timor Leste, 135 Togo, 134, 135, 155(n2) Torrens, Robert, 65 Trade not aid (slogan), 38, 40, 126 Trade structure, 9, 10, 133–8, 141, 154, 163(n2); see also Developing countries Traders, 20, 44, 49, 86, 106, 116–17, 140 Transfair USA, additional income transferred, 125, 128, 130–1, 153; 161(n9), 161(n11); budget and licensee fees, 127–8, 153; exit from Fairtrade, 161(n13); name change, 161(n9); sales, 161(n10) Tribune (La), 159(n18) Truman, Harry, 34, 35 Turkey, 155(n1) Tuvalu, 135 UCIRI (Union de Comunidades Indigenas de la Region del Istmo), 98, 157(n4) Uganda, 134, 135, 138 Un Comtrade, 20, 134 Underdevelopment, see development Unequal exchange, 1–2, 16–22, 25, 37, 62, 76, 120, 132, 133; unequal ecological exchange, 22–4 United Nations, 10, 144, 155(n4) United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 9, 10, 13, 14, 16, 20–1, 38, 133, 134, 135, 154, 162(n19), 162(n21), 163(n2) United Kingdom, 8, 25, 31, 32, 36, 46, 53, 56–7, 60–2, 64–9, 71, 127, 128, 132 United States, 16, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 29, 31, 32, 35, 36, 42, 46, 53, 54, 61, 63, 67, 71, 79, 90, 125, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 136, 156(n2), 158(n8), 158(n9); American System, 26, 67; United States Agency for International Development (USAID), 138; see also Transfair USA UTZ Certified, 54, 55, 56, 70 Van der Hoff, Frans, 3, 38–43, 87–9, 98, 139, 158(n4), 158(n5), 162(n26), 163(n1) 178 Sylla T02779 02 index 178 28/11/2013 13:04 index Vanuatu, 135 Vent for surplus theory, 65 Vertical integration, 19–21, 41 Vietnam, 74 Wage, 79, 80, 158(n7), 160(n26), 160(n27), 161(n5); minimum wage, 51, 95, 98; reservation wage, 94–5; wage employment, 19, 72, 94, 123–4, 128, 131, 133, 137, 142, 162(n22) Wal-Mart, 78, 79 Washington Consensus, 73 Wealth of Nations, see Smith, Adam West Indies, 60–2, Williams, Eric, 60–2 Williamson, Jeffrey G., 162(n27) World Bank, 17, 31, 42; development indicators, 9, 10–12, 15, 30, 89, 131, 137, 153, 161(n7, n14, n17) World Fair Trade Organization, 44–5, 46, 80, 151 World-system theory, 76 World Trade Organization, 26, 28, 29, 31–3, 74, 144, 155(n3) Yemen, 135 Zambia, 135 179 Sylla T02779 02 index 179 28/11/2013 13:04 Sylla T02779 02 index 180 28/11/2013 13:04


pages: 253 words: 79,214

The Money Machine: How the City Works by Philip Coggan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, call centre, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, endowment effect, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", joint-stock company, junk bonds, labour market flexibility, large denomination, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, pattern recognition, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Free-market enthusiasts also pointed to the success of those Asian countries that had followed a broadly free-market view, such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and the failure of those countries, notably in Africa, that had followed a statist or socialist model. A so-called ‘Washington consensus’ argued that any economy which wanted to prosper should follow the free-market model: lower taxes, reduced government deficits and open capital markets. These policies were often made a condition for countries requiring aid from the International Monetary Fund, the Washington-based organization that underpins the global financial system. The period since 2000 has seen the Washington consensus come under attack. First, the US model looks not quite as attractive as it did in the late 1990s.


pages: 303 words: 74,206

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change by Ehsan Masood

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, energy security, European colonialism, financial engineering, government statistician, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mahbub ul Haq, mass immigration, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mohammed Bouazizi, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, zoonotic diseases

Cuba’s lowly GDP ranking, said Haq “shows the price of socialism.”14 Draper has a different recollection and denies having any pressure put on him from the White House (or elsewhere). What is not in doubt, however, is that the Human Development Report and the Human Development Index were a direct challenge, not only to GDP, but to what is known as the Washington Consensus. We need to remember that the index was launched at a time of deep economic and debt crises, not unlike the time of this writing, except that the countries in the midst of austerity (then known as structural adjustment) were mostly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Export earnings were falling and debt was rising as these countries turned to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the two Washington-based international financial institutions, for help.

Export earnings were falling and debt was rising as these countries turned to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the two Washington-based international financial institutions, for help. In return, these institutions demanded a reduced role for the state, leading to lower spending on basic needs such as health and education. It is this consensus that the HDI stood against, as the 2010 report, the twentieth edition, makes clear: By the early 1990s the Washington Consensus had attained near hegemony, and mainstream development thinking held that the best payoffs would come from hewing to its key tenets of economic liberalization and deregulation. Many Western countries were also reducing the role of the public sector in the economy and lightening regulation.


pages: 515 words: 142,354

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Alex Hyde-White

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, pensions crisis, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, working-age population

The story I tell here is a dramatic illustration of several themes that have preoccupied me in recent years—themes that should have global resonance: The first is the influence of ideas, in particular how ideas about the efficiency and stability of free and unfettered markets (a set of ideas sometimes referred to as “neoliberalism”) have shaped not just policies but institutions over the past third of a century. I have elsewhere described the policies that dominated the development discourse, called the Washington Consensus policies, and shaped the conditions imposed on developing countries.10 This book is about how these same ideas shaped what was viewed as the next step in the tremendously important project of European integration, the sharing of a common currency—and derailed it. Today, the same battle of ideas is being fought in myriad skirmishes.

., 266 Camdessus, Michel, 314 campaign contributions, 195, 355 Canada, 96 early 1990s expansion of, 209 in NAFTA, xiv railroad privatization in, 55 tax system in, 191 US’s free trade with, 45–46, 47 capital, 76–77 bank, 284–85 human, 78, 137 return to, 388 societal vs. physical, 77–78 tax on, 356 unemployment increased by, 264 capital adequacy standards, 152 capital budget, 245 capital controls, 389–90 capital flight, 126–34, 217, 354, 359 austerity and, 140 and labor flows, 135 capital flows, 14, 15, 25, 26, 27–28, 40, 116, 125, 128, 131, 351 economic volatility exacerbated by, 28, 274 and foreign ownership, 195 and technology, 139 capital inflows, 110–11 capitalism: crises in, xviii, 148–49 inclusive, 317 capital requirements, 152, 249, 378 Caprio, Gerry, 387 capture, 158–60 carbon price, 230, 260, 265, 368 cash, 39 cash flow, 194 Catalonia, xi CDU party, 314 central banks, 59, 354, 387–88 balance sheets of, 386 capture of, 158–59 credit auctions by, 282–84 credit creation by, 277–78 expertise of, 363 independence of, 157–63 inequality created by, 154 inflation and, 153, 166–67 as lender of last resort, 85, 362 as political institutions, 160–62 regulations and, 153 stability and, 8 unemployment and, 8, 94, 97, 106, 147, 153 CEO compensation, 383 Chapter 11, 259–60, 291 childhood poverty, 72 Chile, 55, 152–53 China, 81, 98, 164, 319, 352 exchange-rate policy of, 251, 254, 350–51 global integration of, 49–50 low prices of, 251 rise of, 75 savings in, 257 trade surplus of, 118, 121, 350–52 wages controlled in, 254 as world’s largest economy, 318, 327 chits, 287–88, 290, 299–300, 387, 388–389 Citigroup, 355 climate change, 229–30, 251, 282, 319 Clinton, Bill, xiv, xv, 187 closing hours, 220 cloves, 230 cognitive capture, 159 Cohesion Fund, 243 Cold War, 6 collateral, 364 collective action, 41–44, 51–52 and inequality, 338 and stabilization, 246 collective bargaining, 221 collective goods, 40 Common Agricultural Policy, 338 common regulatory framework, 241 communism, 10 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), 360, 382 comparative advantage, 12, 171 competition, 12 competitive devaluation, 104–6, 254 compromise, 22–23 confidence, 95, 200–201, 384 in banks, 127 in bonds, 145 and structural reforms, 232 and 2008 crisis, 280 confirmation bias, 309, 335 Congress, US, 319, 355 connected lending, 280 connectedness, 68–69 Connecticut, GDP of, 92 Constitutional Court, Greek, 198 consumption, 94, 278 consumption tax, 193–94 contract enforcement, 24 convergence, 13, 92–93, 124, 125, 139, 254, 300–301 convergence criteria, 15, 87, 89, 96–97, 99, 123, 244 copper mines, 55 corporate income tax, 189–90, 227 corporate taxes, 189–90, 227, 251 corporations, 323 regulations opposed by, xvi and shutdown of Greek banks, 229 corruption, 74, 112 privatization and, 194–95 Costa, António, 332 Council of Economic Advisers, 358 Council of State, Greek, 198 countercyclical fiscal policy, 244 counterfactuals, 80 Countrywide Financial, 91 credit, 276–85 “divorce”’s effect on, 278–79 excessive, 250, 274 credit auctions, 282–84 credit bubbles, 122–123 credit cards, 39, 49, 153 credit creation, 248–50, 277–78, 386 by banks, 280–82 domestic control over, 279–82 regulation of, 277–78 credit default swaps (CDSs), 159–60 crisis policy reforms, 262–67 austerity to growth, 263–65 debt restructuring and, 265–67 Croatia, 46, 331, 338 currency crises, 349 currency pegs, xii current account, 333–34 current account deficits, 19, 88, 108, 110, 120–121, 221, 294 and exit from euro, 273, 285–89 see also trade deficit Cyprus, 16, 30, 140, 177, 331, 386 capital controls in, 390 debt-to-GDP ratio of, 231 “haircut” of, 350, 367 Czech Republic, 46, 331 debit cards, 39, 49 debtors’ prison, 204 debt restructuring, 201, 203–6, 265–67, 290–92, 372, 390 of private debt, 291 debts, xx, 15, 93, 96, 183 corporate, 93–94 crisis in, 110–18 in deflation, xii and exit from eurozone, 273 with foreign currency, 115–18 household, 93–94 increase in, 18 inherited, 134 limits of, 42, 87, 122, 141, 346, 367 monetization of, 42 mutualization of, 242–43, 263 place-based, 134, 242 reprofiling of, 32 restructuring of, 259 debt-to-GDP ratio, 202, 210–11, 231, 266, 324 Declaration of Independence, 319 defaults, 102, 241, 338, 348 and debt mutualization, 243 deficit fetishism, 96 deficits, fiscal, xx, 15, 20, 93, 96, 106, 107–8, 122, 182, 384 and balanced-budget multiplier, 188–90, 265 constitutional amendment on, 339 and exit from euro, 273, 289–90 in Greece, 16, 186, 215, 233, 285–86, 289 limit of, 42, 87, 94–95, 122, 138, 141, 186, 243, 244, 265, 346, 367 primary, 188 problems financing, 110–12 structural, 245 deficits, trade, see trade deficits deflation, xii, 147, 148, 151, 166, 169, 277, 290 Delors, Jacques, 7, 332 democracy, lack of faith in, 312–14 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), xiii democratic deficit, 26–27, 35, 57–62, 145 democratic participation, xix Denmark, 45, 307, 313, 331 euro referendum of, 58 deposit insurance, 31, 44, 129, 199, 301, 354–55, 386–87 common in eurozone, 241, 242, 246, 248 derivatives, 131, 355 Deutsche Bank, 283, 355 devaluation, 98, 104–6, 254, 344 see also internal devaluation developing countries, and Washington Consensus, xvi discretion, 262–63 discriminatory lending practices, 283 disintermediation, 258 divergence, 15, 123, 124–44, 255–56, 300, 321 in absence of crisis, 128–31 capital flight and, 126–34 crisis policies’ exacerbation of, 140–43 free mobility of labor and, 134–36, 142–44, 242 in public investment, 136–38 reforms to prevent, 243 single-market principle and, 125–26 in technology, 138–39 in wealth, 139–40 see also capital flows; labor movement diversification, of production, 47 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, 355 dollar peg, 50 downsizing, 133 Draghi, Mario, 127, 145, 156, 158, 165, 269, 363 bond market supported by, 127, 200, 201 Drago, Luis María, 371 drug prices, 219 Duisenberg, Willem Frederik “Wim,” 251 Dynamic Stochastic Equilibrium model, 331 East Asia, 18, 25, 95, 102–3, 112, 123, 202, 364, 381 convergence in, 138 Eastern Europe, 10 Economic Adjustment Programme, 178 economic distortions, 191 economic growth, xii, 34 confidence and, 232 in Europe, 63–64, 69, 73–74, 74, 75, 163 lowered by inequality, 212–13 reform of, 263–65 and structural reforms, 232–35 economic integration, xiv–xx, 23, 39–50 euro and, 46–47 political integration vs., 51–57 single currency and, 45–46 economic rents, 226, 280 economics, politics and, 308–18 economic security, 68 economies of scale, 12, 39, 55, 138 economists, poor forecasting by, 307 education, 20, 76, 344 investment in, 40, 69, 137, 186, 211, 217, 251, 255, 300 electricity, 217 electronic currency, 298–99, 389 electronics payment mechanism, 274–76, 283–84 emigration, 4, 68–69 see also migration employment: central banks and, 8, 94, 97 structural reforms and, 257–60 see also unemployment Employment Act (1946), 148 energy subsidies, 197 Enlightenment, 3, 318–19 environment, 41, 257, 260, 323 equality, 225–26 equilibrium, xviii–xix Erasmus program, 45 Estonia, 90, 331, 346 euro, xiv, 325 adjustments impeded by, 13–14 case for, 35–39 creation of, xii, 5–6, 7, 10, 333 creation of institutions required by, 10–11 divergence and, see divergence divorce of, 272–95, 307 economic integration and, 46–47, 268 as entailing fixed exchange rate, 8, 42–43, 46–47, 86–87, 92, 93, 94, 102, 105, 143, 193, 215–16, 240, 244, 249, 252, 254, 286, 297 as entailing single interest rate, 8, 85–88, 92, 93, 94, 105, 129, 152, 240, 244, 249 and European identification, 38–39 financial instability caused by, 131–32 growth promised by, 235 growth slowed by, 73 hopes for, 34 inequality increased by, xviii interest rates lowered by, 235 internal devaluation of, see internal devaluation literature on, 327–28 as means to end, xix peace and, 38 proponents of, 13 referenda on, 58, 339–40 reforms needed for, xii–xiii, 28–31 risk of, 49–50 weakness of, 224 see also flexible euro Eurobond, 356 euro crisis, xiii, 3, 4, 9 catastrophic consequences of, 11–12 euro-euphoria, 116–17 Europe, 151 free trade area in, 44–45 growth rates in, 63–64, 69, 73–74, 74, 75, 163 military conflicts in, 196 social models of, 21 European Central Bank (ECB), 7, 17, 80, 112–13, 117, 144, 145–73, 274, 313, 362, 368, 380 capture of, 158–59 confidence in, 200–201 corporate bonds bought by, 141 creation of, 8, 85 democratic deficit and, 26, 27 excessive expansion controlled by, 250 flexibility of, 269 funds to Greece cut off by, 59 German challenges to, 117, 164 governance and, 157–63 inequality created by, 154–55 inflation controlled by, 8, 25, 97, 106, 115, 145, 146–50, 151, 163, 165, 169–70, 172, 250, 256, 266 interest rates set by, 85–86, 152, 249, 302, 348 Ireland forced to socialize losses by, 134, 156, 165 new mandate needed by, 256 as political institution, 160–62 political nature of, 153–56 quantitative easing opposed by, 151 quantitative easing undertaken by, 164, 165–66, 170, 171 regulations by, 249, 250 unemployment and, 163 as unrepresentative, 163 European Commission, 17, 58, 161, 313, 332 European Court of Human Rights, 45 European Economic Community (EEC), 6 European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), 30, 335 European Exchange Rate Mechanism II (ERM II), 336 European Free Trade Association, 44 European Free Trade Association Court, 44 European Investment Bank (EIB), 137, 247, 255, 301 European Regional Development Fund, 243 European Stability Mechanism, 23, 246, 357 European Union: budget of, 8, 45, 91 creation of, 4 debt and deficit limits in, 87–88 democratic deficit in, 26–27 economic growth in, 215 GDP of, xiii and lower rates of war, 196 migration in, 90 proposed exit of UK from, 4 stereotypes in, 12 subsidiarity in, 8, 41–42, 263 taxes in, 8, 261 Euro Summit Statement, 373 eurozone: austerity in, see austerity banking union in, see banking union counterfactual in, 235–36 double-dip recessions in, 234–35 Draghi’s speech and, 145 economic integration and, xiv–xx, 23, 39–50, 51–57 as flawed at birth, 7–9 framework for stability of, 244–52 German departure from, 32, 292–93 Greece’s possible exit from, 124 hours worked in, 71–72 lack of fiscal policy in, 152 and move to political integration, xvi, 34, 35, 51–57 Mundell’s work on dangers of, 87 policies of, 15–17 possible breakup of, 29–30 privatization avoided in, 194 saving, 323–26 stagnant GDP in, 12, 65–68, 66, 67 structure of, 8–9 surpluses in, 120–22 theory of, 95–97 unemployment in, 71, 135, 163, 177–78, 181, 331 working-age population of, 70 eurozone, proposed structural reforms for, 239–71 common financial system, see banking union excessive fiscal responsibility, 163 exchange-rate risks, 13, 47, 48, 49–50, 125, 235 exchange rates, 80, 85, 288, 300, 338, 382, 389 of China, 251, 254, 350–51 and competitive devaluation, 105–6 after departure of northern countries, 292–93 of euro, 8, 42–43, 46–47, 86–87, 92, 93, 94, 102, 105, 215–16, 240, 244, 249, 252, 254, 286, 297 flexible, 50, 248, 349 and full employment, 94 of Germany, 254–55, 351 gold and, 344–45 imports and, 86 interest rates and, 86 quantitative easing’s lowering of, 151 real, 105–6 and single currencies, 8, 42–43, 46–47, 86–87, 92, 93, 94, 97–98 stabilizing, 299–301 and trade deficits, 107, 118 expansionary contractions, 95–96, 208–9 exports, 86, 88, 97–99, 98 disappointing performance of, 103–5 external imbalances, 97–98, 101, 109 externalities, 42–43, 121, 153, 301–2 surpluses as, 253 extremism, xx, 4 Fannie Mae, 91 farmers, US, in deflation, xii Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), 91 Federal Reserve, US, 349 alleged independence of, 157 interest rates lowered by, 150 mandate of, 8, 147, 172 money pumped into economy by, 278 quantitative easing used by, 151, 170 reform of, 146 fiat currency, 148, 275 and taxes, 284 financial markets: lobbyists from, 132 reform of, 214, 228–29 short-sighted, 112–13 financial systems: necessity of, xix real economy of, 149 reform of, 257–58 regulations needed by, xix financial transaction system, 275–76 Finland, 16, 81, 122, 126, 292, 296, 331, 343 growth in, 296–97 growth rate of, 75, 76, 234–35 fire departments, 41 firms, 138, 186–87, 245, 248 fiscal balance: and cutting spending, 196–98 tax revenue and, 190–96 Fiscal Compact, 141, 357 fiscal consolidation, 310 fiscal deficits, see deficits, fiscal fiscal policy, 148, 245, 264 in center of macro-stabilization, 251 countercyclical, 244 in EU, 8 expansionary, 254–55 stabilization of, 250–52 fiscal prudence, 15 fiscal responsibility, 163 flexibility, 262–63, 269 flexible euro, 30–31, 272, 296–305, 307 cooperation needed for, 304–5 food prices, 169 forbearance, 130–31 forecasts, 307 foreclosure proposal, 180 foreign ownership, privatization and, 195 forestry, 81 France, 6, 14, 16, 114, 120, 141, 181–82, 331, 339–40, 343 banks of, 202, 203, 231, 373 corporate income tax in, 189–90 euro creation regretted in, 340 European Constitution referendum of, 58 extreme right in, xi growth in, 247 Freddie Mac, 91 Freefall (Stiglitz), 264, 335 free mobility of labor, xiv, 26, 40, 125, 134–36, 142–44, 242 Friedman, Milton, 151, 152–53, 167, 339 full employment, 94–97, 379 G-20, 121 gas: import of, 230 from Russia, 37, 81, 93 Gates Foundation, 276 GDP-indexed bonds, 267 German bonds, 114, 323 German Council of Economic Experts, 179, 365 Germany, xxi, 14, 30, 65, 108, 114, 141, 181–82, 207, 220, 286, 307, 331, 343, 346, 374 austerity pushed by, 186, 232 banks of, 202, 203, 231–32, 373 costs to taxpayers of, 184 as creditor, 140, 187, 267 debt collection by, 117 debt in, 105 and debt restructuring, 205, 311 in departure from eurozone, 32, 292–93 as dependent on Russian gas, 37 desire to leave eurozone, 314 ECB criticized by, 164 EU economic practices controlled by, 17 euro creation regretted in, 340 exchange rate of, 254–55, 351 failure of, 13, 78–79 flexible exchange of, 304 GDP of, xviii, 92 in Great Depression, 187 growing poverty in, 79 growth of, 78, 106, 247 hours worked per worker in, 72 inequality in, 79, 333 inflation in, 42, 338, 358 internal solidarity of, 334 lack of alternative to euro seen by, 11 migrants to, 320–21, 334–35, 393 minimum wage in, 42, 120, 254 neoliberalism in, 10 and place-based debt, 136 productivity in, 71 programs designed by, 53, 60, 61, 202, 336, 338 reparations paid by, 187 reunification of, 6 rules as important to, 57, 241–42, 262 share of global employment in, 224 shrinking working-age population of, 70, 78–79 and Stability and Growth Pact, 245 and structural reforms, 19–20 “there is no alternative” and, 306, 311–12 trade surplus of, 117, 118–19, 120, 139, 253, 293, 299, 350–52, 381–82, 391 “transfer union” rejected by, 22 US loans to, 187 victims blamed by, 9, 15–17, 177–78, 309 wages constrained by, 41, 42–43 wages lowered in, 105, 333 global financial crisis, xi, xiii–xiv, 3, 12, 17, 24, 67, 73, 75, 114, 124, 146, 148, 274, 364, 387 and central bank independence, 157–58 and confidence, 280 and cost of failure of financial institutions, 131 lessons of, 249 monetary policy in, 151 and need for structural reform, 214 originating in US, 65, 68, 79–80, 112, 128, 296, 302 globalization, 51, 321–23 and diminishing share of employment in advanced countries, 224 economic vs. political, xvii failures of, xvii Globalization and Its Discontents (Stig-litz), 234, 335, 369 global savings glut, 257 global secular stagnation, 120 global warming, 229–30, 251, 282, 319 gold, 257, 275, 277, 345 Goldman Sachs, 158, 366 gold standard, 148, 291, 347, 358 in Great Depression, xii, 100 goods: free movement of, 40, 143, 260–61 nontraded, 102, 103, 169, 213, 217, 359 traded, 102, 103, 216 Gordon, Robert, 251 governance, 157–63, 258–59 government spending, trade deficits and, 107–8 gravity principle, 124, 127–28 Great Depression, 42, 67, 105, 148, 149, 168, 313 Friedman on causes of, 151 gold standard in, xii, 100 Great Malaise, 264 Greece, 14, 30, 41, 64, 81, 100, 117, 123, 142, 160, 177, 265–66, 278, 307, 331, 343, 366, 367–68, 374–75, 386 austerity opposed by, 59, 60–62, 69–70, 207–8, 392 balance of payments, 219 banks in, 200–201, 228–29, 231, 270, 276, 367, 368 blaming of, 16, 17 bread in, 218, 230 capital controls in, 390 consumption tax and, 193–94 counterfactual scenario of, 80 current account surplus of, 287–88 and debt restructuring, 205–7 debt-to-GDP ratio of, 231 debt write-offs in, 291 decline in labor costs in, 56, 103 ECB’s cutting of funds to, 59 economic growth in, 215, 247 emigration from, 68–69 fiscal deficits in, 16, 186, 215, 233, 285–86, 289 GDP of, xviii, 183, 309 hours worked per worker in, 72 inequality in, 72 inherited debt in, 134 lack of faith in democracy in, 312–13 living standards in, 216 loans in, 127 loans to, 310 migrants and, 320–21 milk in, 218, 223, 230 new currency in, 291, 300 oligarchs in, 16, 227 output per working-age person in, 70–71 past downturns in, 235–36 pensions in, 16, 78, 188, 197–98, 226 pharmacies in, 218–20 population decline in, 69, 89 possible exit from eurozone of, 124, 197, 273, 274, 275 poverty in, 226, 261, 376 primary surplus of, 187–88, 312 privatization in, 55, 195–96 productivity in, 71, 342 programs imposed on, xv, 21, 27, 60–62, 140, 155–56, 179–80, 181, 182–83, 184–85, 187–88, 190–93, 195–96, 197–98, 202–3, 205, 206, 214–16, 218–23, 225–28, 229, 230, 231, 233–34, 273, 278, 308, 309–11, 312, 315–16, 336, 338 renewable energy in, 193, 229 social capital destroyed in, 78 sovereign spread of, 200 spread in, 332 and structural reforms, 20, 70, 188, 191 tax revenue in, 16, 142, 192, 227, 367–368 tools lacking for recovery of, 246 tourism in, 192, 286 trade deficits in, 81, 194, 216–17, 222, 285–86 unemployment in, xi, 71, 236, 267, 332, 338, 342 urgency in, 214–15 victim-blaming of, 309–11 wages in, 216–17 youth unemployment in, xi, 332 Greek bonds, 116, 126 interest rates on, 4, 114, 181–82, 201–2, 323 restructuring of, 206–7 green investments, 260 Greenspan, Alan, 251, 359, 363 Grexit, see Greece, possible exit from eurozone of grocery stores, 219 gross domestic product (GDP), xvii decline in, 3 measurement of, 341 Growth and Stability Pact, 87 hedge funds, 282, 363 highways, 41 Hitler, Adolf, 338, 358 Hochtief, 367–68 Hoover, Herbert, 18, 95 human capital, 78, 137 human rights, 44–45, 319 Hungary, 46, 331, 338 hysteresis, 270 Iceland, 44, 111, 307, 354–55 banks in, 91 capital controls in, 390 ideology, 308–9, 315–18 imports, 86, 88, 97–99, 98, 107 incentives, 158–59 inclusive capitalism, 317 income, unemployment and, 77 income tax, 45 Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation, 376–377 Indonesia, 113, 230–31, 314, 350, 364, 378 industrial policies, 138–39, 301 and restructuring, 217, 221, 223–25 Industrial Revolution, 3, 224 industry, 89 inequality, 45, 72–73, 333 aggregate demand lowered by, 212 created by central banks, 154 ECB’s creation of, 154–55 economic performance affected by, xvii euro’s increasing of, xviii growth’s lowering of, 212 hurt by collective action, 338 increased by neoliberalism, xviii increase in, 64, 154–55 inequality in, 72, 212 as moral issue, xviii in Spain, 72, 212, 225–26 and tax harmonization, 260–61 and tax system, 191 inflation, 277, 290, 314, 388 in aftermath of tech bubble, 251 bonds and, 161 central banks and, 153, 166–67 consequences of fixation on, 149–50, 151 costs of, 270 and debt monetization, 42 ECB and, 8, 25, 97, 106, 115, 145, 146–50, 151, 163, 165, 169–70, 172, 255, 256, 266 and food prices, 169 in Germany, 42, 338, 358 interest rates and, 43–44 in late 1970s, 168 and natural rate hypothesis, 172–73 political decisions and, 146 inflation targeting, 157, 168–70, 364 information, 335 informational capital, 77 infrastructure, xvi–xvii, 47, 137, 186, 211, 255, 258, 265, 268, 300 inheritance tax, 368 inherited debt, 134 innovation, 138 innovation economy, 317–18 inputs, 217 instability, xix institutions, 93, 247 poorly designed, 163–64 insurance, 355–356 deposit, see deposit insurance mutual, 247 unemployment, 91, 186, 246, 247–48 integration, 322 interest rates, 43–44, 86, 282, 345, 354 in aftermath of tech bubble, 251 ECB’s determination of, 85–86, 152, 249, 302, 348 and employment, 94 euro’s lowering of, 235 Fed’s lowering of, 150 on German bonds, 114 on Greek bonds, 4, 114, 181–82 on Italian bonds, 114 in late 1970s, 168 long-term, 151, 200 negative, 316, 348–49 quantitative easing and, 151, 170 short-term, 249 single, eurozone’s entailing of, 8, 85–88, 92, 93, 94, 105, 129, 152, 240, 244, 249 on Spanish bonds, 114, 199 spread in, 332 stock prices increased by, 264 at zero lower bound, 106 intermediation, 258 internal devaluation, 98–109, 122, 126, 220, 255, 388 supply-side effects of, 99, 103–4 International Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, 79, 341 International Labor Organization, 56 International Monetary Fund (IMF), xv, xvii, 10, 17, 18, 55, 61, 65–66, 96, 111, 112–13, 115–16, 119, 154, 234, 289, 309, 316, 337, 349, 350, 370, 371, 381 and Argentine debt, 206 conditions of, 201 creation of, 105 danger of high taxation warnings of, 190 debt reduction pushed by, 95 and debt restructuring, 205, 311 and failure to restore credit, 201 global imbalances discussed by, 252 and Greek debts, 205, 206, 310–11 on Greek surplus, 188 and Indonesian crisis, 230–31, 364 on inequality’s lowering of growth, 212–13 Ireland’s socialization of losses opposed by, 156–57 mistakes admitted by, 262, 312 on New Mediocre, 264 Portuguese bailout of, 178–79 tax measures of, 185 investment, 76–77, 111, 189, 217, 251, 264, 278, 367 confidence and, 94 divergence in, 136–38 in education, 137, 186, 211, 217, 251, 255, 300 infrastructure in, xvi–xvii, 47, 137, 186, 211, 255, 258, 265, 268, 300 lowered by disintermediation, 258 public, 99 real estate, 199 in renewable energy, 229–30 return on, 186, 245 stimulation of, 94 in technology, 137, 138–39, 186, 211, 217, 251, 258, 265, 300 investor state dispute settlement (ISDS), 393–94 invisible hand, xviii Iraq, refugees from, 320 Iraq War, 36, 37 Ireland, 14, 16, 44, 113, 114–15, 122, 178, 234, 296, 312, 331, 339–40, 343, 362 austerity opposed in, 207 debt of, 196 emigrants from, 68–69 GDP of, 18, 231 growth in, 64, 231, 247, 340 inherited debt in, 134 losses socialized in, 134, 156–57, 165 low debt in, 88 real estate bubble in, 108, 114–15, 126 surplus in, 17, 88 taxes in, 142–43, 376 trade deficits in, 119 unemployment in, 178 irrational exuberance, 14, 114, 116–17, 149, 334, 359 ISIS, 319 Italian bonds, 114, 165, 323 Italy, 6, 14, 16, 120, 125, 331, 343 austerity opposed in, 59 GDP per capita in, 352 growth in, 247 sovereign spread of, 200 Japan, 151, 333, 342 bubble in, 359 debt of, 202 growth in, 78 quantitative easing used by, 151, 359 shrinking working-age population of, 70 Java, unemployment on, 230 jobs gap, 120 Juncker, Jean-Claude, 228 Keynes, John Maynard, 118, 120, 172, 187, 351 convergence policy suggested by, 254 Keynesian economics, 64, 95, 108, 153, 253 King, Mervyn, 390 knowledge, 137, 138–39, 337–38 Kohl, Helmut, 6–7, 337 krona, 287 labor, marginal product of, 356 labor laws, 75 labor markets, 9, 74 friction in, 336 reforms of, 214, 221 labor movement, 26, 40, 125, 134–36, 320 austerity and, 140 capital flows and, 135 see also migration labor rights, 56 Lamers, Karl, 314 Lancaster, Kelvin, 27 land tax, 191 Latin America, 10, 55, 95, 112, 202 lost decade in, 168 Latvia, 331, 346 GDP of, 92 law of diminishing returns, 40 learning by doing, 77 Lehman Brothers, 182 lender of last resort, 85, 362, 368 lending, 280, 380 discriminatory, 283 predatory, 274, 310 lending rates, 278 leverage, 102 Lichtenstein, 44 Lipsey, Richard, 27 liquidity, 201, 264, 278, 354 ECB’s expansion of, 256 lira, 14 Lithuania, 331 living standards, 68–70 loans: contraction of, 126–27, 246 nonperforming, 241 for small and medium-size businesses, 246–47 lobbyists, from financial sector, 132 location, 76 London interbank lending rate (LIBOR), 131, 355 Long-Term Refinancing Operation, 360–361 Lucas, Robert, xi Luxembourg, 6, 94, 142–43, 331, 343 as tax avoidance center, 228, 261 luxury cars, 265 Maastricht Treaty, xiii, 6, 87, 115, 146, 244, 298, 339, 340 macro-prudential regulations, 249 Malta, 331, 340 manufacturing, 89, 223–24 market failures, 48–49, 86, 148, 149, 335 rigidities, 101 tax policy’s correction of, 193 market fundamentalism, see neoliberalism market irrationality, 110, 125–26, 149 markets, limitations of, 10 Meade, James, 27 Medicaid, 91 medical care, 196 Medicare, 90, 91 Mellon, Andrew, 95 Memorandum of Agreement, 233–34 Merkel, Angela, 186 Mexico, 202, 369 bailout of, 113 in NAFTA, xiv Middle East, 321 migrant crisis, 44 migration, 26, 40, 68–69, 90, 125, 320–21, 334–35, 342, 356, 393 unemployment and, 69, 90, 135, 140 see also labor movement military power, 36–37 milk, 218, 223, 230 minimum wage, 42, 120, 254, 255, 351 mining, 257 Mississippi, GDP of, 92 Mitsotakis, Constantine, 377–78 Mitsotakis, Kyriakos, 377–78 Mitterrand, François, 6–7 monetarism, 167–68, 169, 364 monetary policy, 24, 85–86, 148, 264, 325, 345, 364 as allegedly technocratic, 146, 161–62 conservative theory of, 151, 153 in early 1980s US, 168, 210 flexibility of, 244 in global financial crisis, 151 political nature of, 146, 153–54 recent developments in theory of, 166–73 see also interest rates monetary union, see single currencies money laundering, 354 monopolists, privatization and, 194 moral hazard, 202, 203 mortgage rates, 170 mortgages, 302 multinational chains, 219 multinational development banks, 137 multinationals, 127, 223, 376 multipliers, 211–12, 248 balanced-budget, 188–90, 265 Mundell, Robert, 87 mutual insurance, 247 mutualization of debt, 242–43, 263 national development banks, 137–38 natural monopolies, 55 natural rate hypothesis, 172 negative shocks, 248 neoliberalism, xvi, 24–26, 33, 34, 98–99, 109, 257, 265, 332–33, 335, 354 on bubbles, 381 and capital flows, 28 and central bank independence, 162–63 in Germany, 10 inequality increased by, xviii low inflation desired by, 147 recent scholarship against, 24 Netherlands, 6, 44, 292, 331, 339–40, 343 European Constitution referendum of, 58 New Democracy Party, Greek, 61, 185, 377–78 New Mediocre, 264 New World, 148 New Zealand, 364 Nokia, 81, 234, 297 nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU), 379–80 nonaccelerating wage rate of unemployment (NAWRU), 379–80 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 276 nonperforming loans, 241 nontraded goods sector, 102, 103, 169, 213, 217, 359 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), xiv North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 196 Norway, 12, 44, 307 referendum on joining EU, 58 nuclear deterrence, 38 Obama, Barack, 319 oil, import of, 230 oil firms, 36 oil prices, 89, 168, 259, 359 oligarchs: in Greece, 16, 227 in Russia, 280 optimal currency area, 345 output, 70–71, 111 after recessions, 76 Outright Monetary Transactions program, 361 overregulate, 132 Oxfam, 72 panic of 1907, 147 Papandreou, Andreas, 366 Papandreou, George, xiv, 60–61, 184, 185, 220, 221, 226–27, 309, 312, 366, 373 reform of banks suggested by, 229 paradox of thrift, 120 peace, 34 pensions, 9, 16, 78, 177, 188, 197–98, 226, 276, 370 People’s Party, Portugal, 392 periphery, 14, 32, 171, 200, 296, 301, 318 see also specific countries peseta, 14 pharmacies, 218–20 Phishing for Phools (Akerlof and Shiller), 132 physical capital, 77–78 Pinochet, Augusto, 152–53 place-based debt, 134, 242 Pleios, George, 377 Poland, 46, 333, 339 assistance to, 243 in Iraq War, 37 police, 41 political integration, xvi, 34, 35 economic integration vs., 51–57 politics, economics and, 308–18 pollution, 260 populism, xx Portugal, 14, 16, 64, 177, 178, 331, 343, 346 austerity opposed by, 59, 207–8, 315, 332, 392 GDP of, 92 IMF bailout of, 178–79 loans in, 127 poverty in, 261 sovereign spread of, 200 Portuguese bonds, 179 POSCO, 55 pound, 287, 335, 346 poverty, 72 in Greece, 226, 261 in Portugal, 261 in Spain, 261 predatory lending, 274, 310 present discount value, 343 Price of Inequality, The (Stiglitz), 154 prices, 19, 24 adjustment of, 48, 338, 361 price stability, 161 primary deficit, 188, 389 primary surpluses, 187–88 private austerity, 126–27, 241–42 private sector involvement, 113 privatization, 55, 194–96, 369 production costs, 39, 43, 50 production function, 343 productivity, 71, 332, 348 in manufacturing, 223–24 after recessions, 76–77 programs, 17–18 Germany’s design of, 53, 60, 61, 187–88, 205, 336, 338 imposed on Greece, xv, 21, 27, 60–62, 140, 155–56, 179–80, 181, 182–83, 184–85, 187–88, 190–93, 195–96, 197–98, 202–3, 205, 206, 214–16, 218–23, 225–28, 229, 230, 231, 233–34, 273, 278, 308, 309–11, 312, 315–16, 336, 338 of Troika, 17–18, 21, 155–57, 179–80, 181, 182–83, 184–85, 187–93, 196, 202, 205, 207, 208, 214–16, 217, 218–23, 225–28, 229, 231, 233–34, 273, 278, 308, 309–11, 312, 313, 314, 315–16, 323–24, 346, 366, 379, 392 progressive automatic stabilizers, 244 progressive taxes, 248 property rights, 24 property taxes, 192–93, 227 public entities, 195 public goods, 40, 337–38 quantitative easing (QE), 151, 164, 165–66, 170–72, 264, 359, 361, 386 railroads, 55 Reagan, Ronald, 168, 209 real estate bubble, 25, 108, 109, 111, 114–15, 126, 148, 172, 250, 301, 302 cause of, 198 real estate investment, 199 real exchange rate, 105–6, 215–16 recessions, recovery from, 94–95 recovery, 76 reform, 75 theories of, 27–28 regulations, 24, 149, 152, 162, 250, 354, 355–356, 378 and Bush administration, 250–51 common, 241 corporate opposition to, xvi difficulties in, 132–33 of finance, xix forbearance on, 130–31 importance of, 152–53 macro-prudential, 249 in race to bottom, 131–34 Reinhardt, Carmen, 210 renewable energy, 193, 229–30 Republican Party, US, 319 research and development (R&D), 77, 138, 217, 251, 317–18 Ricardo, David, 40, 41 risk, 104, 153, 285 excessive, 250 risk markets, 27 Rogoff, Kenneth, 210 Romania, 46, 331, 338 Royal Bank of Scotland, 355 rules, 57, 241–42, 262, 296 Russia, 36, 264, 296 containment of, 318 economic rents in, 280 gas from, 37, 81, 93, 378 safety nets, 99, 141, 223 Samaras, Antonis, 61, 309, 377 savings, 120 global, 257 savings and loan crisis, 360 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 57, 220, 314, 317 Schengen area, 44 schools, 41, 196 Schröeder, Gerhard, 254 self-regulation, 131, 159 service sector, 224 shadow banking system, 133 shareholder capitalism, 21 Shiller, Rob, 132, 359 shipping taxes, 227, 228 short-termism, 77, 258–59 Silicon Valley, 224 silver, 275, 277 single currencies: conflicts and, 38 as entailing fixed exchange rates, 8, 42–43, 46–47, 86–87, 92, 93, 94, 97–98 external imbalances and, 97–98 and financial crises, 110–18 integration and, 45–46, 50 interest rates and, 8, 86, 87–88, 92, 93, 94 Mundell’s work on, 87 requirements for, 5, 52–53, 88–89, 92–94, 97–98 and similarities among countries, 15 trade integration vs., 393 in US, 35, 36, 88, 89–92 see also euro single-market principle, 125–26, 231 skilled workers, 134–35 skills, 77 Slovakia, 331 Slovenia, 331 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), 127, 138, 171, 229 small and medium-size lending facility, 246–47, 300, 301, 382 Small Business Administration, 246 small businesses, 153 Smith, Adam, xviii, 24, 39–40, 41 social cohesion, 22 Social Democratic Party, Portugal, 392 social program, 196 Social Security, 90, 91 social solidarity, xix societal capital, 77–78 solar energy, 193, 229 solidarity fund, 373 solidarity fund for stabilization, 244, 254, 264, 301 Soros, George, 390 South Dakota, 90, 346 South Korea, 55 bailout of, 113 sovereign risk, 14, 353 sovereign spreads, 200 sovereign wealth funds, 258 Soviet Union, 10 Spain, 14, 16, 114, 177, 178, 278, 331, 335, 343 austerity opposed by, 59, 207–8, 315 bank bailout of, 179, 199–200, 206 banks in, 23, 186, 199, 200, 242, 270, 354 debt of, 196 debt-to-GDP ratio of, 231 deficits of, 109 economic growth in, 215, 231, 247 gold supply in, 277 independence movement in, xi inequality in, 72, 212, 225–26 inherited debt in, 134 labor reforms proposed for, 155 loans in, 127 low debt in, 87 poverty in, 261 real estate bubble in, 25, 108, 109, 114–15, 126, 198, 301, 302 regional independence demanded in, 307 renewable energy in, 229 sovereign spread of, 200 spread in, 332 structural reform in, 70 surplus in, 17, 88 threat of breakup of, 270 trade deficits in, 81, 119 unemployment in, 63, 161, 231, 235, 332, 338 Spanish bonds, 114, 199, 200 spending, cutting, 196–98 spread, 332 stability, 147, 172, 261, 301, 364 automatic, 244 bubble and, 264 central banks and, 8 as collective action problem, 246 solidarity fund for, 54, 244, 264 Stability and Growth Pact, 245 standard models, 211–13 state development banks, 138 steel companies, 55 stock market, 151 stock market bubble, 200–201 stock market crash (1929), 18, 95 stock options, 259, 359 structural deficit, 245 Structural Funds, 243 structural impediments, 215 structural realignment, 252–56 structural reforms, 9, 18, 19–20, 26–27, 214–36, 239–71, 307 from austerity to growth, 263–65 banking union, 241–44 and climate change, 229–30 common framework for stability, 244–52 counterproductive, 222–23 debt restructuring and, 265–67 of finance, 228–29 full employment and growth, 256–57 in Greece, 20, 70, 188, 191, 214–36 growth and, 232–35 shared prosperity and, 260–61 and structural realignment, 252–56 of trade deficits, 216–17 trauma of, 224 as trivial, 214–15, 217–20, 233 subsidiarity, 8, 41–42, 263 subsidies: agricultural, 45, 197 energy, 197 sudden stops, 111 Suharto, 314 suicide, 82, 344 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), 91 supply-side effects: in Greece, 191, 215–16 of investments, 367 surpluses, fiscal, 17, 96, 312, 379 primary, 187–88 surpluses, trade, see trade surpluses “Swabian housewife,” 186, 245 Sweden, 12, 46, 307, 313, 331, 335, 339 euro referendum of, 58 refugees into, 320 Switzerland, 44, 307 Syria, 321, 342 Syriza party, 309, 311, 312–13, 315, 377 Taiwan, 55 tariffs, 40 tax avoiders, 74, 142–43, 227–28, 261 taxes, 142, 290, 315 in Canada, 191 on capital, 356 on carbon, 230, 260, 265, 368 consumption, 193–94 corporate, 189–90, 227, 251 cross-border, 319, 384 and distortions, 191 in EU, 8, 261 and fiat currency, 284 and free mobility of goods and capital, 260–61 in Greece, 16, 142, 192, 193–94, 227, 367–68 ideal system for, 191 IMF’s warning about high, 190 income, 45 increase in, 190–94 inequality and, 191 inheritance, 368 land, 191 on luxury cars, 265 progressive, 248 property, 192–93, 227 Reagan cuts to, 168, 210 shipping, 227, 228 as stimulative, 368 on trade surpluses, 254 value-added, 190, 192 tax evasion, in Greece, 190–91 tax laws, 75 tax revenue, 190–96 Taylor, John, 169 Taylor rule, 169 tech bubble, 250 technology, 137, 138–39, 186, 211, 217, 251, 258, 265, 300 and new financial system, 274–76, 283–84 telecoms, 55 Telmex, 369 terrorism, 319 Thailand, 113 theory of the second best, 27–28, 48 “there is no alternative” (TINA), 306, 311–12 Tocqueville, Alexis de, xiii too-big-to-fail banks, 360 tourism, 192, 286 trade: and contractionary expansion, 209 US push for, 323 trade agreements, xiv–xvi, 357 trade balance, 81, 93, 100, 109 as allegedly self-correcting, 98–99, 101–3 and wage flexibility, 104–5 trade barriers, 40 trade deficits, 89, 139 aggregate demand weakened by, 111 chit solution to, 287–88, 290, 299–300, 387, 388–89 control of, 109–10, 122 with currency pegs, 110 and fixed exchange rates, 107–8, 118 and government spending, 107–8, 108 of Greece, 81, 194, 215–16, 222, 285–86 structural reform of, 216–17 traded goods, 102, 103, 216 trade integration, 393 trade surpluses, 88, 118–21, 139–40, 350–52 discouragement of, 282–84, 299–300 of Germany, 118–19, 120, 139, 253, 293, 299, 350–52, 381–82, 391 tax on, 254, 351, 381–82 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, xv, 323 transfer price system, 376 Trans-Pacific Partnership, xv, 323 Treasury bills, US, 204 Trichet, Jean-Claude, 100–101, 155, 156, 164–65, 251 trickle-down economics, 362 Troika, 19, 20, 26, 55, 56, 58, 60, 69, 99, 101–3, 117, 119, 135, 140–42, 178, 179, 184, 195, 274, 294, 317, 362, 370–71, 373, 376, 377, 386 banks weakened by, 229 conditions of, 201 discretion of, 262 failure to learn, 312 Greek incomes lowered by, 80 Greek loan set up by, 202 inequality created by, 225–26 poor forecasting of, 307 predictions by, 249 primary surpluses and, 187–88 privatization avoided by, 194 programs of, 17–18, 21, 155–57, 179–80, 181, 182–83, 184–85, 187–93, 196, 197–98, 202, 204, 205, 207, 208, 214–16, 217, 218–23, 225–28, 229, 231, 233–34, 273, 278, 308, 309–11, 312, 313, 314, 315–16, 323–24, 348, 366, 379, 392 social contract torn up by, 78 structural reforms imposed by, 214–16, 217, 218–23, 225–38 tax demand of, 192 and tax evasion, 367 see also European Central Bank (ECB); European Commission; International Monetary Fund (IMF) trust, xix, 280 Tsipras, Alexis, 61–62, 221, 273, 314 Turkey, 321 UBS, 355 Ukraine, 36 unemployment, 3, 64, 68, 71–72, 110, 111, 122, 323, 336, 342 as allegedly self-correcting, 98–101 in Argentina, 267 austerity and, 209 central banks and, 8, 94, 97, 106, 147 ECB and, 163 in eurozone, 71, 135, 163, 177–78, 181, 331 and financing investments, 186 in Finland, 296 and future income, 77 in Greece, xi, 71, 236, 267, 331, 338, 342 increased by capital, 264 interest rates and, 43–44 and internal devaluation, 98–101, 104–6 migration and, 69, 90, 135, 140 natural rate of, 172–73 present-day, in Europe, 210 and rise of Hitler, 338, 358 and single currency, 88 in Spain, 63, 161, 231, 235, 332, 338 and structural reforms, 19 and trade deficits, 108 in US, 3 youth, 3, 64, 71 unemployment insurance, 91, 186, 246, 247–48 UNICEF, 72–73 unions, 101, 254, 335 United Kingdom, 14, 44, 46, 131, 307, 331, 332, 340 colonies of, 36 debt of, 202 inflation target set in, 157 in Iraq War, 37 light regulations in, 131 proposed exit from EU by, 4, 270 United Nations, 337, 350, 384–85 creation of, 38 and lower rates of war, 196 United States: banking system in, 91 budget of, 8, 45 and Canada’s 1990 expansion, 209 Canada’s free trade with, 45–46, 47 central bank governance in, 161 debt-to-GDP of, 202, 210–11 financial crisis originating in, 65, 68, 79–80, 128, 296, 302 financial system in, 228 founding of, 319 GDP of, xiii Germany’s borrowing from, 187 growing working-age population of, 70 growth in, 68 housing bubble in, 108 immigration into, 320 migration in, 90, 136, 346 monetary policy in financial crisis of, 151 in NAFTA, xiv 1980–1981 recessions in, 76 predatory lending in, 310 productivity in, 71 recovery of, xiii, 12 rising inequality in, xvii, 333 shareholder capitalism of, 21 Small Business Administration in, 246 structural reforms needed in, 20 surpluses in, 96, 187 trade agenda of, 323 unemployment in, 3, 178 united currency in, 35, 36, 88, 89–92 United States bonds, 350 unskilled workers, 134–35 value-added tax, 190, 192 values, 57–58 Varoufakis, Yanis, 61, 221, 309 velocity of circulation, 167 Venezuela, 371 Versaille, Treaty of, 187 victim blaming, 9, 15–17, 177–78, 309–11 volatility: and capital market integration, 28 in exchange rates, 48–49 Volcker, Paul, 157, 168 wage adjustments, 100–101, 103, 104–5, 155, 216–17, 220–22, 338, 361 wages, 19, 348 expansionary policies on, 284–85 Germany’s constraining of, 41, 42–43 lowered in Germany, 105, 333 wage stagnation, in Germany, 13 war, change in attitude to, 38, 196 Washington Consensus, xvi Washington Mutual, 91 wealth, divergence in, 139–40 Weil, Jonathan, 360 welfare, 196 West Germany, 6 Whitney, Meredith, 360 wind energy, 193, 229 Wolf, Martin, 385 worker protection, 56 workers’ bargaining rights, 19, 221, 255 World Bank, xv, xvii, 10, 61, 337, 357, 371 World Trade Organization, xiv youth: future of, xx–xxi unemployment of, 3, 64, 71 Zapatero, José Luis Rodríguez, xiv, 155, 362 zero lower bound, 106 ALSO BY JOSEPH E.

., 393 in US, 35, 36, 88, 89–92 see also euro single-market principle, 125–26, 231 skilled workers, 134–35 skills, 77 Slovakia, 331 Slovenia, 331 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), 127, 138, 171, 229 small and medium-size lending facility, 246–47, 300, 301, 382 Small Business Administration, 246 small businesses, 153 Smith, Adam, xviii, 24, 39–40, 41 social cohesion, 22 Social Democratic Party, Portugal, 392 social program, 196 Social Security, 90, 91 social solidarity, xix societal capital, 77–78 solar energy, 193, 229 solidarity fund, 373 solidarity fund for stabilization, 244, 254, 264, 301 Soros, George, 390 South Dakota, 90, 346 South Korea, 55 bailout of, 113 sovereign risk, 14, 353 sovereign spreads, 200 sovereign wealth funds, 258 Soviet Union, 10 Spain, 14, 16, 114, 177, 178, 278, 331, 335, 343 austerity opposed by, 59, 207–8, 315 bank bailout of, 179, 199–200, 206 banks in, 23, 186, 199, 200, 242, 270, 354 debt of, 196 debt-to-GDP ratio of, 231 deficits of, 109 economic growth in, 215, 231, 247 gold supply in, 277 independence movement in, xi inequality in, 72, 212, 225–26 inherited debt in, 134 labor reforms proposed for, 155 loans in, 127 low debt in, 87 poverty in, 261 real estate bubble in, 25, 108, 109, 114–15, 126, 198, 301, 302 regional independence demanded in, 307 renewable energy in, 229 sovereign spread of, 200 spread in, 332 structural reform in, 70 surplus in, 17, 88 threat of breakup of, 270 trade deficits in, 81, 119 unemployment in, 63, 161, 231, 235, 332, 338 Spanish bonds, 114, 199, 200 spending, cutting, 196–98 spread, 332 stability, 147, 172, 261, 301, 364 automatic, 244 bubble and, 264 central banks and, 8 as collective action problem, 246 solidarity fund for, 54, 244, 264 Stability and Growth Pact, 245 standard models, 211–13 state development banks, 138 steel companies, 55 stock market, 151 stock market bubble, 200–201 stock market crash (1929), 18, 95 stock options, 259, 359 structural deficit, 245 Structural Funds, 243 structural impediments, 215 structural realignment, 252–56 structural reforms, 9, 18, 19–20, 26–27, 214–36, 239–71, 307 from austerity to growth, 263–65 banking union, 241–44 and climate change, 229–30 common framework for stability, 244–52 counterproductive, 222–23 debt restructuring and, 265–67 of finance, 228–29 full employment and growth, 256–57 in Greece, 20, 70, 188, 191, 214–36 growth and, 232–35 shared prosperity and, 260–61 and structural realignment, 252–56 of trade deficits, 216–17 trauma of, 224 as trivial, 214–15, 217–20, 233 subsidiarity, 8, 41–42, 263 subsidies: agricultural, 45, 197 energy, 197 sudden stops, 111 Suharto, 314 suicide, 82, 344 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), 91 supply-side effects: in Greece, 191, 215–16 of investments, 367 surpluses, fiscal, 17, 96, 312, 379 primary, 187–88 surpluses, trade, see trade surpluses “Swabian housewife,” 186, 245 Sweden, 12, 46, 307, 313, 331, 335, 339 euro referendum of, 58 refugees into, 320 Switzerland, 44, 307 Syria, 321, 342 Syriza party, 309, 311, 312–13, 315, 377 Taiwan, 55 tariffs, 40 tax avoiders, 74, 142–43, 227–28, 261 taxes, 142, 290, 315 in Canada, 191 on capital, 356 on carbon, 230, 260, 265, 368 consumption, 193–94 corporate, 189–90, 227, 251 cross-border, 319, 384 and distortions, 191 in EU, 8, 261 and fiat currency, 284 and free mobility of goods and capital, 260–61 in Greece, 16, 142, 192, 193–94, 227, 367–68 ideal system for, 191 IMF’s warning about high, 190 income, 45 increase in, 190–94 inequality and, 191 inheritance, 368 land, 191 on luxury cars, 265 progressive, 248 property, 192–93, 227 Reagan cuts to, 168, 210 shipping, 227, 228 as stimulative, 368 on trade surpluses, 254 value-added, 190, 192 tax evasion, in Greece, 190–91 tax laws, 75 tax revenue, 190–96 Taylor, John, 169 Taylor rule, 169 tech bubble, 250 technology, 137, 138–39, 186, 211, 217, 251, 258, 265, 300 and new financial system, 274–76, 283–84 telecoms, 55 Telmex, 369 terrorism, 319 Thailand, 113 theory of the second best, 27–28, 48 “there is no alternative” (TINA), 306, 311–12 Tocqueville, Alexis de, xiii too-big-to-fail banks, 360 tourism, 192, 286 trade: and contractionary expansion, 209 US push for, 323 trade agreements, xiv–xvi, 357 trade balance, 81, 93, 100, 109 as allegedly self-correcting, 98–99, 101–3 and wage flexibility, 104–5 trade barriers, 40 trade deficits, 89, 139 aggregate demand weakened by, 111 chit solution to, 287–88, 290, 299–300, 387, 388–89 control of, 109–10, 122 with currency pegs, 110 and fixed exchange rates, 107–8, 118 and government spending, 107–8, 108 of Greece, 81, 194, 215–16, 222, 285–86 structural reform of, 216–17 traded goods, 102, 103, 216 trade integration, 393 trade surpluses, 88, 118–21, 139–40, 350–52 discouragement of, 282–84, 299–300 of Germany, 118–19, 120, 139, 253, 293, 299, 350–52, 381–82, 391 tax on, 254, 351, 381–82 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, xv, 323 transfer price system, 376 Trans-Pacific Partnership, xv, 323 Treasury bills, US, 204 Trichet, Jean-Claude, 100–101, 155, 156, 164–65, 251 trickle-down economics, 362 Troika, 19, 20, 26, 55, 56, 58, 60, 69, 99, 101–3, 117, 119, 135, 140–42, 178, 179, 184, 195, 274, 294, 317, 362, 370–71, 373, 376, 377, 386 banks weakened by, 229 conditions of, 201 discretion of, 262 failure to learn, 312 Greek incomes lowered by, 80 Greek loan set up by, 202 inequality created by, 225–26 poor forecasting of, 307 predictions by, 249 primary surpluses and, 187–88 privatization avoided by, 194 programs of, 17–18, 21, 155–57, 179–80, 181, 182–83, 184–85, 187–93, 196, 197–98, 202, 204, 205, 207, 208, 214–16, 217, 218–23, 225–28, 229, 231, 233–34, 273, 278, 308, 309–11, 312, 313, 314, 315–16, 323–24, 348, 366, 379, 392 social contract torn up by, 78 structural reforms imposed by, 214–16, 217, 218–23, 225–38 tax demand of, 192 and tax evasion, 367 see also European Central Bank (ECB); European Commission; International Monetary Fund (IMF) trust, xix, 280 Tsipras, Alexis, 61–62, 221, 273, 314 Turkey, 321 UBS, 355 Ukraine, 36 unemployment, 3, 64, 68, 71–72, 110, 111, 122, 323, 336, 342 as allegedly self-correcting, 98–101 in Argentina, 267 austerity and, 209 central banks and, 8, 94, 97, 106, 147 ECB and, 163 in eurozone, 71, 135, 163, 177–78, 181, 331 and financing investments, 186 in Finland, 296 and future income, 77 in Greece, xi, 71, 236, 267, 331, 338, 342 increased by capital, 264 interest rates and, 43–44 and internal devaluation, 98–101, 104–6 migration and, 69, 90, 135, 140 natural rate of, 172–73 present-day, in Europe, 210 and rise of Hitler, 338, 358 and single currency, 88 in Spain, 63, 161, 231, 235, 332, 338 and structural reforms, 19 and trade deficits, 108 in US, 3 youth, 3, 64, 71 unemployment insurance, 91, 186, 246, 247–48 UNICEF, 72–73 unions, 101, 254, 335 United Kingdom, 14, 44, 46, 131, 307, 331, 332, 340 colonies of, 36 debt of, 202 inflation target set in, 157 in Iraq War, 37 light regulations in, 131 proposed exit from EU by, 4, 270 United Nations, 337, 350, 384–85 creation of, 38 and lower rates of war, 196 United States: banking system in, 91 budget of, 8, 45 and Canada’s 1990 expansion, 209 Canada’s free trade with, 45–46, 47 central bank governance in, 161 debt-to-GDP of, 202, 210–11 financial crisis originating in, 65, 68, 79–80, 128, 296, 302 financial system in, 228 founding of, 319 GDP of, xiii Germany’s borrowing from, 187 growing working-age population of, 70 growth in, 68 housing bubble in, 108 immigration into, 320 migration in, 90, 136, 346 monetary policy in financial crisis of, 151 in NAFTA, xiv 1980–1981 recessions in, 76 predatory lending in, 310 productivity in, 71 recovery of, xiii, 12 rising inequality in, xvii, 333 shareholder capitalism of, 21 Small Business Administration in, 246 structural reforms needed in, 20 surpluses in, 96, 187 trade agenda of, 323 unemployment in, 3, 178 united currency in, 35, 36, 88, 89–92 United States bonds, 350 unskilled workers, 134–35 value-added tax, 190, 192 values, 57–58 Varoufakis, Yanis, 61, 221, 309 velocity of circulation, 167 Venezuela, 371 Versaille, Treaty of, 187 victim blaming, 9, 15–17, 177–78, 309–11 volatility: and capital market integration, 28 in exchange rates, 48–49 Volcker, Paul, 157, 168 wage adjustments, 100–101, 103, 104–5, 155, 216–17, 220–22, 338, 361 wages, 19, 348 expansionary policies on, 284–85 Germany’s constraining of, 41, 42–43 lowered in Germany, 105, 333 wage stagnation, in Germany, 13 war, change in attitude to, 38, 196 Washington Consensus, xvi Washington Mutual, 91 wealth, divergence in, 139–40 Weil, Jonathan, 360 welfare, 196 West Germany, 6 Whitney, Meredith, 360 wind energy, 193, 229 Wolf, Martin, 385 worker protection, 56 workers’ bargaining rights, 19, 221, 255 World Bank, xv, xvii, 10, 61, 337, 357, 371 World Trade Organization, xiv youth: future of, xx–xxi unemployment of, 3, 64, 71 Zapatero, José Luis Rodríguez, xiv, 155, 362 zero lower bound, 106 ALSO BY JOSEPH E.


pages: 470 words: 130,269

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas by Janek Wasserman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, New Journalism, New Urbanism, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game, éminence grise

They shaped post–World War II life through such institutions as the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS), the RAND Corporation, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the Group of Thirty. They spearheaded the successful conservative counterattack against Keynesian economics in the 1970s and ushered in our current age’s faith in globalization, free markets, rule of law, entrepreneurship, and neoliberalism. They helped inspire the “Washington Consensus” at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which has played a significant and troubling role in the Latin American debt crises in the 1980s, the East Asian crisis of the late 1990s, and the 2008 global economic crisis. Hayek and especially Mises also motivated a generation of American libertarian and free-market activists who took Austrianism in a radical, political, and ideological direction.

Austrians played instrumental roles in these communities by persuading institutional actors, state and nonstate, to follow their prescriptions in times of uncertainty and crisis. Through GATT, the Bellagio Group, the RAND Corporation, and others, Haberler, Machlup, and Morgenstern proved adept at behind-the-scenes policy interventions that shaped economic liberalization and Cold War reasoning in the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the 1980s “Washington Consensus,” which coalesced in the halls of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and US Treasury, was articulated by a Machlup student, John Williamson. Austrian ideas appeared in myriad, unexpected locations, even as the Austrians themselves approached retirement.21 As the last members of the original school aged, they and their followers worked to solidify the school’s legacy or legacies.

Relieved of its Austrian historical context and, indeed, even of the very historical reference, this set of assumptions—imported to the U.S. in the suitcases of a handful of disabused Viennese intellectuals—has come to inform not just the Chicago school of economics but all significant public conversation over policy choices in the contemporary United States.”29 The Austrian argument that planning necessarily leads to dictatorship, Judt alleged, paved the way for a reactionary backlash: the destruction of (social) democracy and the rise of neoliberalism; the ascension of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan; the economic successes of Milton Friedman’s libertarian Chicago School; and the “Washington Consensus” at the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and US Treasury, which advocated deregulation, privatization of state industries, trade liberalization, and other market-fundamentalist positions. Judt called this ideological turn the “revenge of the Austrians.”30 Similarly, the political theorist Corey Robin saw fin-de-siècle Viennese modernism and Nietzschean cultural criticism in the Austrians’ elitist understanding of subjectivity and entrepreneurship.


pages: 851 words: 247,711

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War by Norman Stone

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, central bank independence, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labour mobility, land reform, long peace, low interest rates, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Money creation, new economy, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, V2 rocket, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

The Rueff reform took a line in financial stabilization that has been familiar since 1923, when Dr Hjalmar Schacht took it in Germany; budget decreases, tax increases, a liberalization of foreign trade and a devaluation of 15.45 per cent. It is political arithmetic, dressed up, and is currently called the ‘Washington consensus’. But the whole was accompanied by a measure that caught the world’s attention - introduction of the ‘heavy franc’, at 100 to one. Now, with a money that could be converted at will, producers were to be stimulated by competition, and this indeed was to happen: France created some world-class industrial concerns in a short time.

By now, ideas of radical change were in the air: otherwise, the Western world would be in thrall to the Arabs, and the Soviet Union, with its vast oil revenues, would predominate. A declaration promising exchange rate stability and restored trade was made; beyond that - a sign of what was to come - the International Monetary Fund was invoked, and at last given a true world role. This was the start of the celebrated formula, the ‘Washington Consensus’, in effect shaped by the USA. It amounted to a recognition that the post-war order, with reference in effect to John Maynard Keynes and Bretton Woods in 1944, had failed. There must be liberalization. The problem of inflation was worldwide, but it was worst in the Atlantic countries. The USA, after the Nixon crash, was in poor shape and needed the formula itself, as the dollar went down.

The general made his broadcast, on lines by now somewhat traditional, but this time the generals had learned: they did indeed promise a return of democracy, but not at once. Parties were banned. But Turgut Özal went ahead with the IMF programme of 24 January. As was already happening with Pinochet, this was ‘the Washington consensus’ in action, and it was to work remarkably well. 24 The Eighties The 1980s have entered history, in much the same way as the twenties or the sixties or for that matter, before them, the fin-de-siècle nineties have done. Pinning down such things is not possible: pedantic historians can even claim that such decade moments do not exist.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, friendshoring, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

William Easterly & Ross Levine, ‘Africa’s growth tragedy: Policies and ethnic divisions’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol.112, no.4, November 1997. 22. George Ayittey, Indigenous African institutions, Brill, 2nd edn, 2006. 23. Ayittey 2006, p.486. 24. Belinda Archibong, Brahima Coulibaly & Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, ‘Washington Consensus reforms and economic performance in sub-Saharan Africa: Lessons from the past four decades’, AGI Working Paper 27, February 2021. 25. World Bank, Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reform, 2005, p.271. 26. Scott A Beaulier, ‘Explaining Botswana’s success: The critical role of post-colonial policy’, Cato Journal, vol.23, no.2, 2003. 27.

William Easterly, ‘The lost decades: developing countries’ stagnation in spite of policy reform 1980–1998’, World Bank, February 2001. William Easterly, ‘In search of reforms for growth: New stylized facts on policy and growth outcomes’, working paper 26318, National Bureau of Economic Research, September 2019. 32. Kevin Grier & Robin Grier, ‘The Washington Consensus works: Causal effects of reform, 1970–2015’, Journal of Comparative Economics vol.49, No 1, March 2021. Pasquale Marco Marrazzo & Alessio Terzi, ‘Structural reform waves and economic growth’, European Central Bank, No.2111, November 2017. 33. Branko Milanović, Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System that Rules the World, Belknap Press, 2019, chap.4.2.


pages: 312 words: 91,835

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic

Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, place-making, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, stakhanovite, trade route, transfer pricing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

It was a time to celebrate the flexibility and small scale of the German Mittelstand (mid-sized manufacturers) and the family enterprises in Emilia-Romagna, Italy. Japan’s rise began to look unstoppable. No one took notice of China yet. And of course the end of communism was not foreseen at all. A final wave of literature that I want to mention here is from the 1990s. It was dominated by the Washington Consensus (a set of policy prescriptions that emphasized deregulation and privatization) and the forecasting of the “end of history” (the title of an influential 1989 article by Francis Fukuyama, leading to the book The End of History and the Last Man [1992]). Japan still appeared to be ascendant, but China made a cameo appearance.

See also capitalism; inequality of opportunity; labor; scalable jobs; skill-biased technological progress; socialism wars: causes/effects of, 4–5; data access and, 14; forecasts and, 21; rich countries (1918–1980) and, 48; preindustrial period and, 50–51, 56, 62, 69; future and, 56; Piketty on, 64, 97–98; Chile and, 84; Spain and, 89; external investments and, 95; education and, 102; twenty-first and twenty-second centuries and, 163–164; China/United States and, 163–164, 258n6; Africa and, 173; modern era and, 246n5; taxes and, 250n35. See also World War I and other wars Washington Consensus, 157 wealth: income/consumption versus, 39, 40, 244n19; hidden, 40, 244n23; 2013 estimate of, 41; preindustrial period and, 62–64, 65–66, 69; disease and, 63; destruction of, 98; national choices and, 139–142; capital income and, 184; wages and, 215; inequality interventions and, 218; US population share of, 244n19; negative changes in rich peoples’, 244n20; as metric, 244n21; price levels and, 244n24; preindustrial plague and, 247n16; one-person households and, 248n23; pre-1929, 254n7; United States and, 254n7; middle-class, 260n20; financial assets and, 260n21.


pages: 288 words: 90,349

The Challenge for Africa by Wangari Maathai

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, deliberate practice, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, sustainable-tourism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

In effect, this meant orienting their economies to increase exports, while further opening their markets to foreign goods. When such largely unregulated liberalization failed to make much of a dent in poverty or spur high rates of growth, however, the IMF, World Bank, and the U.S. Treasury Department prescribed new measures. In what became known as the Washington Consensus, poor countries were encouraged—in some cases mandated—to further liberalize their policies on trade and the free flow of capital. In order to accelerate GDP growth, nations were urged to continue privatization programs, curtail government functions, and deregulate their industries. In the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century, some African economies did begin to grow.

But by 2001, the number of people in Africa living in extreme poverty had nearly doubled to 316 million, from 164 million twenty years before.5 And along with international campaigners advocating fair trade and working against debt and poverty, a growing number of economists, among them the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, began to view the prescriptions of the Washington Consensus as neither concerned enough with equity—who benefited from these policies—nor focused sufficiently on the economic sustainability of global GDP growth and its political, social, and environmental ramifications. As the twenty-first century began, many African nations had relatively new heads of state.


pages: 382 words: 92,138

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato

Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, circular economy, clean tech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, dual-use technology, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, green transition, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, linear model of innovation, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Chang (2008) offers similar illustrations for South Korea and other recently emerged economies. China has engaged in a targeted industrialization strategy too, only joining the World Trade Organization once its industries were ready to compete, rather than as part of an International Monetary Fund–backed industrialization strategy. The Chinese strategy showed the weaknesses of the Washington Consensus on development, which denied the State the active role that it played in the development of major industrialized nations such as the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom. If there is strong evidence that the State can be effective in pursuing targeted catch-up policies by focusing resources on being dominant in certain industrial sectors, why is it not accepted that the State can have a greater role in the development of new technologies and applications beyond simply funding basic science and having an infrastructure to support private sector activity?

Soviet Union 37, 39; market failure theory applied to 61; as measure of innovation performance 34, 41; myth of business investment requirements 53–5; myth of innovation being about 44, 159–60; as not enough 142; of pharmaceutical companies 25–6, 188; R&D/GDP 52; SEMATECH funding 99; spending differences 42; of struggling OECD countries 41; technological change investments 59; in wind energy projects 144–5; worker tax credit 54 R&D/GDP 52 R&D Magazine 63 redistributional policies 31 Reenen, John van 46 Reinert, Erik 9n3, 38n5, 73 Reinhart, Carmen 17–18 renewable energy credits (RECs) 115n1 Renewable Portfolio Standards 114 ‘repatriation tax holiday’ 175 ‘representative’ agent 60 research 60, 78, 84, 136; see also science rewards, socialization of 156 risk 58–62, 70; see also socialization of risk risk landscape 22–3, 58, 194, 198 risk–reward nexus framework 186 risk–reward relationships: Apple and the US government 167–8; collective vs. private benefit 165–6, 196; corporate success resulting in regional economic misery 176–8; need for functional dynamic in 182–3, 197–8; overview 165–7; State recognition in 12 Robinson, Joan 34 Roche 82 Rock, Arthur 94 Rodrik, Dani 27, 28 Rogoff, Kenneth 17–18 Roland, Alex 98n7 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 6, 74 Royal Radar Establishment (RRE) 101 royalties 188–9 Ruegg, Rosalie 148 Ruttan, Vernon 62–3 Sanofi 69 Schmidt, Horace 92, 92–3; see also Apple Schumpeter, Joseph 10n4, 31, 35, 58 Schumpeterian innovation economics: creative destruction concept in 10, 10n4, 58, 165; extended protection in 189; influence of on BNDES 5; investment role in 31; macro models of 44; ‘systems of innovation’ view of 35–6; theory of 36n4 science 49, 51, 57, 59n1, 69; see also research Seagate 97 Segal, David 170 Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology (SEMATECH) consortium 99 Shapiro, Isaac 170–71, 171n2 share buybacks 25–7, 67, 171, 175 shareholder-value ideology 184, 186 Shiman, Philip 98n7 Shi Zhengrong 141, 152–4 Shockley, William 76 Silicon Valley 20, 63, 78, 95 Silver, Jonathan 129, 154 SIRI 103, 105–6, 109 SITRA, Finnish Innovation Fund 190 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) 10, 45–6, 45n6, 111n13 Small Business Administration (US) 94 small business associations 19 Small Business Innovation Development Act of 1982 79 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) (US) 20, 47, 79–81, 80, 188 Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) (US) 94 Smith, Adam 30; see also Adam Smith Institute; Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, An; ‘Invisible Hand’ socialization of risk and privatization of rewards: as cause of inequity and instability 185; direct or indirect returns of 187–91; framework for change of 185–7; income-contingent loans and equity 189–90; in the innovation economy 3; ‘innovation fund’ creation 189; IPR 189; mapping innovative labour into division of rewards 184–5; in pharmaceutical development 181; in public–private partnerships 27; skewed reality of risk and reward 181–5 social vs. private returns on investment 3–4 solar power: see wind and solar power Solow, Robert M. 33–4 Solyndra 129–32, 151, 154–5, 162; see also clean technology; ‘No More Solyndras Act’ Something Ventured, Something Gained (documentary) 78 Sony 108 Soppe, Birgit 146 South Korea 40, 61, 120–21 Soviet Union 37–9, 39, 76 Spain 120n4, 121, 121, 157 Spectrawatt 130n11, 162 spillovers 194 spinoff business model 76 SPINTRONICS 97, 97n5 Sputnik launch 76 Stanford Research Institute (SRI) 105–6; see also SIRI State: administrative role of 6, 12; attracting talent 12; capitalintensive investment by 27; ‘crowding in’ of 5–6, 8; ‘Developmental State’ 10, 37–8, 37–8n5, 40, 68; ‘directionality’ provided by 32n2; ‘dynamizing in’ 8; economic role of 1, 29; flexibility of 195–6; funding: see individual US agencies and departments; industrial directives of 21; as leading entrepreneurial force 193; market creation by 62, 167; organizational dynamics consideration 197; performance indicators lacking for 194; as private sector partner 5; response to criticism 19; responsibilities of 13; scope of endeavours of 18–19, 195; sectors funded by 63, 83, 196; targeted catch-up policies of 40; views of 9; see also ‘entrepreneurial’ State; ‘picking winners’ State development banks 2–3, 5, 122, 137–40, 189–91; see also Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES); China Development Bank (CDB); KfW (German Development Bank) stock market 49–50 Strategic Computing Initiative (SCI) 98–9 strategic management 197 Stumpe, Bent 101 Sullivan, Martin A. 174 SunPower 151 Suntech of China 152–5, 152n5 supply-side policies 83, 113–15, 159 sustainability 117, 119, 123, 195; see also green industrial revolution Swanson, Richard 151 Sweden 121 ‘systems of innovation’ approach: defined 36; foundation of 35–7; market failure approach vs. 9–10, 61–2; need for 22; regional 39; State role in 74; see also innovation; innovation ecosystems; Schumpeterian innovation economics ‘systems’ perspective 196 tariffs 108, 157, 157n6; see also feed-in tariffs Tassey, Gregory 32 tax avoidance: by Apple 11, 12, 171–5, 188; corporate 173–5, 187; ‘tax gap’ 187, 187n1 tax breaks 45–7 tax credits: energy 114, 138; impact of on R&D 28, 52–4; and R&D 111n13; and R&E 110; wind and solar power 126n8, 145, 149 tax cuts 10, 19, 23, 54, 69 taxes: antidumping tariffs 108; business as dependent on 69; ‘carbon tax’ 114; Citizens for Tax Justice 174n5; citizens unawareness of uses of 166; global avoidance schemes 174, 174n5; incentives to biotech firms 81; innovation systems not supported by 187–8; insensitivity of investment to 30n1; IRS 529 plans 111, 111n15; ‘patent box’ policy 51–2; policies impacting SMEs 45; policy 51; ‘repatriation tax holiday’ 175; State return from 165; US tax code 174; see also private vs. social returns; risk–reward nexus framework Taxol 188 Tea Party movement 17 technology: causing creative destruction 58; commissioning of advances in 54; core enabler technologies of Apple 95; dual-use 97; and growth 33–4; impact of regions on national performance 39; interagency collaborations in 74; origins of Apple products 109; revolutions 125, 126; SIRI 103, 105–6; State leadership of strategy for 40; unique situations in 59; see also computer field; wind and solar power technology commercialized: from capacitive sensing to click-wheels 99–101, 100n9, 103; cellular 102, 104, 109; from click-wheels to multi-touch screens 102–3; digital signal processing (DSP) 109; GPS 105; GPTs 62; LCD 107–8; lithium-ion battery 108; resistive touch-screens 101; silicon ICs impact on 98; thin-film transistors (TFTs) 107–8; ‘zero-emission’ electric vehicles 108 technology policy 75 Technology Reinvestment Program (TRP) 97 TFP of India vs. 46 TFTs (thin-film transistors) 107–8 Thomas, Patrick 148 ‘trade wars’ 122, 131, 157 ‘traitorous eight’, the 76 Tulum, Oner: on biopharmaceutical industry 67, 69, 82; NIH spending data compilation of 25, 69; on orphan drugs 81–2 United Kingdom (UK): approach to green initiatives 124–6; BBC 16; BERD (business expenditure on R&D) in 24; Big Society theme of 15–16; clean technology investment by 120; energy strategies of 116; government energy R&D spending 121, 121; green revolution in 120; Medical Research Council (MRC) 20, 67; outsourcing in 16; public R&D spending in 61; R&D/GDP 52; sector specialties of 42; SME government support 45; SME performance in 46 United States: Air Force 98, 104, 105; American Energy Innovation Council (AEIC) 26; Apple’s risk– reward relationship with 167–8; Army 107; competitiveness decline in 176; energy policy 158; energy strategies of 116, 137; funding and innovation in 52; funding sources for basic research R&D in 61; funding sources for R&D in 60, 60–61, 60n2; green revolution in 120; ‘hidden Developmental State’ in 38, 38n5; innovation threatened in 24; systems of innovation in 37; tax code 174; tax system 172; ‘trade wars’ of 122, 131, 157; types of venture capital successes in 49; undermining of innovation in 53; wind capacity of 143; see also taxes; specific agencies and departments of University of Southern California 77–8 UNIX 104 USSR: see Soviet Union US Windpower (later Kenetech) 147 Valentine, Don 94 Vallas, Steven P. 67–8 value: extraction 26, 42, 162; measures of 34 Venrock 94 Vensys Energiesysteme 149 venture capital: in Europe 53; Europe’s lag attributed to lack of 20; exit opportunities 48, 67, 81, 130, 138; failure of 107; government stimulation of 116; impatience of 129–32, 146n2; limited role of 131, 138; myth of as risk loving 47–50, 142, 161–2; and NASDAQ’s coevolution 50; presenting as lead risk taker 183; public vs. private 19, 47; short-termist approach of 108, 127; timing of investment by 23; Venrock 94; see also private sector venture capital sector investment: clean technology 161; green revolution 127–8, 128n9; in Solyndra 130; subsectors of within clean energy 128 venture capital stages of investment 47, 48; early stage and seed funding awards by 80; risk of loss in 48 Vestas: Denmark producing 143; DoE research influence on 148; early years of 147; patents purchased by 145; policy responses by 125, 137; rugged designs of 146 vision: Apple’s 93, 94, 99–100; ‘green’ 116, 120, 123; lack of 107; in nanotechnology 83–4; State’s 21–4, 58, 62–4 Warburg Pincus 50 Washington Consensus 40 Washington Post 57 Wayne, Ronald 89, 89n1; see also Apple welfare state institutions 31 Westerman, Wayne 102–3 Westinghouse 107 wind and solar power: clean technology in crisis 158–9; collective failure in 163; decline of US firms in 144, 144n1; grid parity in 141; networks of learning in 146n2; R&D myth in 159–60; small being beautiful myth in 160–61; solar bankruptcies 153–6; symbiotic innovation ecosystems in 162–3; venture capital myth in 161–2; from ‘Wind Rush’ to rise of China’s wind power sector 144–50; withdrawal of government support 149; see also specific corporations; clean technology wind and solar power markets: competition, innovation and market size 156–8; disrupting existing markets 161; global market for 143; growth opportunities in 156–7; growth powered by crisis 142–4; and manufacturing of 144, 146–7, 153 wind and solar power policies: California’s tax programme 147; fostering development 144–5; providing incentives 149–51; subsidies 148–9, 152; tax credits 145, 149 wind and solar power technology: aerodynamics of 148; computer use in 147–8; C-Si 129, 130n11, 151–2, 158; Denmark’s Gedser design 145; oil company role in 161n8; origins of solar technologies 150–53; remote power applications 150; research behind 148–9; see also clean technology wind energy R&D projects 144–6 Witty, Andrew 66–7 World Trade Organization (WTO) 40 World War II 74 Wozniak, Steve 89, 89n1, 94; see also Apple Wuxi-Guolian 152 Wuxi Suntech 153 Xerox 107 Xerox PARC 24 Zond Corporation 147–8 Table of Contents Halftitle Page Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Contents List of Tables and Figures List of Acronyms Acknowledgements Foreword by Carlota Perez Introduction: Do Something Different A Discursive Battle Beyond Fixing Failures From ‘Crowding In’ to ‘Dynamizing In’ Images Matter Structure of the Book Chapter 1: From Crisis Ideology to the Division of Innovative Labour And in the Eurozone State Picking Winners vs.


China's Good War by Rana Mitter

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, land reform, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, sexual politics, South China Sea, Washington Consensus

By the early 2000s, however, this combination of factors shifted in significant ways. Russia and China became closer, an association marked by the establishment of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (2001), a security grouping that, although sometimes mocked as an alliance of dictators, had an interest in challenging the “Washington consensus.” China also made it clear that it saw the US role in the region as intrusive rather than stabilizing. It perceived the US role as shielding Japan, which China now felt was an obstacle in the way of its growing power and territorial claims in the region. In contrast, US alliances in the region were becoming more consensual.

First, China still portrays itself as a victim of the global order, an image for which memory of the war against Japan, a conflict that China did not seek or provoke, is very useful. Then, it seeks to portray itself as a mentor to other Global South countries, arguing that the Belt and Road Initiative provides a practical means for rejecting Western hegemony, in the form of the “new imperialism” of the Washington consensus. Justice, Morality, and Diplomacy One of China’s main reasons for looking back to the war and postwar periods is to prove that it deserves justice from international society in terms of its territorial claims. The “Cairo syndrome” is about finding ways to strengthen the argument that China should have sovereignty over the Diaoyu / Senkaku Islands as well as the South China Sea.


The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World by Linsey McGoey

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, antiwork, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Clive Stafford Smith, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, income inequality, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Leeson, p-value, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

When Harford suggests that ‘official data from the likes of the World Bank’ should be marshalled against agnotology, he turns a blind eye to legitimate concerns over expert ignorance at the World Bank and IMF. As Guardian economics editor Larry Elliot observes, there has rarely been any admission from ‘the IMF or World Bank that the policies they advocated during the heyday of the so-called Washington Consensus – austerity, privatisation and financial liberalisation – have contributed to weak and unequal growth, with all the political discontent that this has caused.’17 The lack of institutional soul-searching at these organizations post 2008 is a sort of strategic ignorance, and in recent years, academics have published accounts of ‘institutional ignorance’ at the IMF.18 Goldin and Elliot’s criticism is controversial not due to the outlandishness of their statements (their criticisms of the IMF are quite mild), but because of a problem that, for want of any better framing I’ve seen, I label the Bannon–Pinker conundrum – after two figures who have amassed widespread public followings for different reasons: Steven Pinker and Breitbart mastermind Stephen Bannon.

., 130–1 Stigler, George, 133, 246–7, 248 strategic ignorance: autocratic exploitation, 69–71; business practices, 20, 205; Carnegie, 208–10; corporate anonymity, 45–6; definition, 3; of drone strikes, 91–2; economic theory, 122–3; emancipatory nature, 315–17; exposure efforts treated as inexcusable, 269–70; Ford, 79–81, 98; MHRA’s non-prosecution record, 291–2, 293–4; and political networks, 22; Rockefeller, 213–14 strong/smart groups, 16–17, 69–71, 77, 173–4, 312–13 student loans, 185 Suez crisis, 31 suicide rates, 307 Sun, 114–15 Sutherland, Kathryn, 145–6, 159 Syll, Lars, 187 Symons, Baroness, 32 taxation, Paine’s proposals, 184, 308 Taylor, Gordon, 105–6 Taylor, Harriet, 7, 60–1, 153, 157–60, 166, 299 Taylor, Helen, 157–60 Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, 68 Teicher, Martin, 280 Temple, Robert, 287–8 Tett, Gillian, 53 Thalidomide, 254, 256–8 think tanks, 65 Thomas, Richard, 110, 111 Tillerson, Rex, 214 tobacco industry, 51 Tocqueville, Alexis de: Democracy in America, 197–200, 309, 322–3; and divine providence, 322–4; French workers, 325–6; government regulation of industry, 20–1, 197–200, 301; prejudice against women, 166–7, 324–6 torture, 72–5 trade: free trade, 17–13, 57, 200–1; mercantilism, 169–70, 171; protectionism, 186, 188, 190–1; Ricardo’s comparative advantage theory, 186–8; US policy, 171, 188, 190, 217 Trefgarne, George, 179–80 Trump, Donald: class myths of voter support, 81–4, 162, 163; elite ignorance, 90–1, 93–4; on history, 314; on Obama, 82, 148–9; presidential election, 19; selective use of facts, 92–4; on torture, 73–4; and truth, 17; wealthy backers, 83–4 truth, liberating potential, 9–10 United Kingdom: male enfranchisement, 42; market interventionism, 43–4; military interventions, 14–15; Suez crisis, 31; trade policies, 44, 57, 186, 190–1; weak regulation of pharmaceutical companies, 252–3, 278, 291–2 United States: conscription, 14–15; drone strikes, 91–2; in-country inequality, 14–15, 36–7; labour oppression, 129–30; laissez-faire policies, 194–5; military interventions, 14–15, 68–9, 185; New Deal, 196; origins myths, 169; suicide rates, 307; trade policies, 171, 188, 190, 217; War Crimes Act (1996), 73; workplace deaths, 219–20 United States Department of Justice, 102, 238, 252, 261 Unser, Bobby, 242–3 unwitting ignorance, 42, 122–3 useful unknowns, 51–6, 257, 277 utilitarianism, 8, 155 ‘veil of ignorance’, 8–9, 46 Viner, Jacob, 300, 302–3 Vinson and Elkins, 235 Vioxx, 258–62 von Eschenbach, Andrew, 273 voter ignorance: Brexit, 82–3, 89–90, 162; collective, shared problem, 243–4; definition, 94; justification for disenfranchisement, 70, 156, 174; political knowledge test, 66–7, 95–6; solutions, 94–5; Trump election, 19, 162; see also democracy, and disenfranchisement War Crimes Act (1996) (US), 73 Washington Consensus, 34 Washington Post, 89, 171, 217, 257 Watkins, Sherron, 235 Watson, Mathew, 187, 188 wealth: evidence of intelligence, 77, 81; financial oligarchy, 65; ignorance and inherited wealth, 139; inherited wealth, 117–18; and morality, 162–3; and racism, 84–7; US voter support for Trump, 83–4, 162, 163 wealth inequality: effect on social wellbeing, 135, 147; God’s will, 75–7; growth, 137; in-country inequality, 36–7; India-England, 129; legitimisation, 75–6; as natural law, 71; relative poverty, 143 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 6–7, 121, 125–6, 136, 169, 189; abridged versions, 144–6 Weber, Max The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 67 welfare systems, 185–6 wellbeing, and inequality, 135, 147 whistle-blowers, 40, 262–3 White, William Allen, 81, 97, 111–12 white-collar crime, Mens Rea Reform Act, 236–44 Whittam Smith, Andreas, 102 Whittamore, Steve, 107–8, 109, 110 wilful ignorance: definition, 21–2, 228–9; difficult to prove, 22; Enron, 21–2; equal culpability thesis, 233–5; financial law, 239–40; first court appearances, 227–8; Grenfell Tower fire, 24–6; ‘ignorance doesn’t excuse’ principle, 231–3, 239–40; News International, 274–5; and reckless ignorance, 235; Rupert Murdoch, 101–2; suspected fraud Ketek trials fraud, 271–2, 274–7 Williams, Zoe, 90 Williamson, Kevin, 83 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 20–1, 163, 317; economic fairness, 122; family background and social norms, 268, 269; legacy, 151–2; on mixed education, 312; ‘Rights of Men’ rebuttal of Burke, 149, 150–1 women: domestic violence, 59; ignorance of co-authorship, 7, 60–1; minority women, 59 Woods, Kent, 285–6, 290–1, 292 workplace health and safety, 217, 218–19, 238 World Bank: disputed assumption of neutrality, 221–2; Employing Workers Indicator, 225; institutional ignorance, 33–4; presidents, 219–20; weakened labour protection, 137, 218–20 Zinn, Howard, 196


pages: 91 words: 26,009

Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bretton Woods, corporate governance, feminist movement, Frank Gehry, ghettoisation, Howard Zinn, informal economy, land bank, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, RAND corporation, reserve currency, special economic zone, spectrum auction, stem cell, The Chicago School, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

The ANC soon turned on the more radical organizations like Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness movement and more or less eliminated it. When Nelson Mandela took over as South Africa’s first Black president, he was canonized as a living saint, not just because he is a freedom fighter who spent twenty-seven years in prison but also because he deferred completely to the Washington Consensus. Socialism disappeared from the ANC’s agenda. South Africa’s great “peaceful transition,” so praised and lauded, meant no land reforms, no demands for reparation, no nationalization of South Africa’s mines. Instead there was privatization and structural adjustment. Mandela gave South Africa’s highest civilian award—the Order of Good Hope—to his old friend and supporter General Suharto, the killer of communists in Indonesia.


pages: 586 words: 160,321

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, Jean-Pierre Landau

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, diversification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Irish property bubble, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, short selling, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special drawing rights, tail risk, the payments system, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yield curve

In the end, the Bretton Woods system collapsed; it simply did not incorporate a sustainable and credible way of dealing with the adjustment problem. Afterward, the global exchange rate system started to move very close to the German ideal: free capital flows and floating exchange rates. Later (in the 1980s), this became part of the Washington Consensus (which, interestingly, was also pushed by various French politicians, for example, Jacques Delors), as we discuss in chapter 14. European Exchange Rate Mechanism In Europe, however, matters continued to look different. European governments felt that volatile intra-European exchange rates would be detrimental to the European project, and so, in 1978, they launched the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM for short), an attempt to recreate the Bretton Woods system in a European context.

Equally, there is no country that can safely receive fugitive funds, which constitute an unwanted import of capital, yet cannot safely be used for fixed investment.”4 The possibility of a sudden reversal makes countries that use these funds for long-run investment projects with low market liquidity vulnerable to a crisis. But the pendulum swung, and capital movements resumed. In the 1980s, in the new “Zeitgeist” of deregulation, the new “Washington Consensus” emerged—a consensus that shares many similarities with the German Ordoliberalism discussed in chapter 4. In the international arena, the IMF was at the forefront of designing a system in which rules were developed for a new era of economic but also financial globalization. Free international capital and trade flows were the guiding North Star of a new global architecture.

., 142 Rathenau, Walter, 59–60 recapitalization, 203–4; of banks, 357; direct, 195–97 recessions, 143 Rechtsstaat (rule of law), 57–58 redemption pact, 112–13 redenomination risks, 226–27 refinancing, 321, 344 refugee crisis, 39–40, 378, 379, 381–82 Regling, Klaus, 24, 128, 146 Rehn, Olli, 306–7 Reichsbank Law (1924; Germany), 344 renminbi (Chinese currency), 281–82 Renzi, Matteo, 8, 36, 248 repo rate, 164 repos (sale and repurchase agreements), 164, 321; ELAs as, 322 reputation, in monetary policy, 91–93 reversal rate, 190–91 ring-fencng of assets, 213–14 risk-bearing capital, 204–6 Ritschl, Albrecht, 62–63 Rocard, Michel, 47 Rodrik, Dani, 375 Ronaldo, Cristiano, 192 Roncaglia, Alessandro, 238 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 102, 177 Röpke, Wilhelm, 60, 61, 65 Rostand, Edmond, 71 Rostowski, Jacek, 263 Rougier, Louis, 65 Roumeliotis, Panagotis, 303 Rueff, Jacques, 55, 67–68, 71, 72, 77 ruler model, 143 Russia, 283–86; Crimea annexed by, 36, 381; debts of, 295 Rüstow, Alexander, 65 Sachs, Jeffrey, 250, 266 safe assets, 182–83, 222–26 sale and repurchase agreements (repos), 164, 321 Samaras, Antonis, 230, 231 Santo e Silva, José Maria do Espírito, 201 Sapin, Michel, 39, 163, 233 Sapir, Jacques, 73 Saraceno, Pasquale, 238 Sargent, Thomas, 110, 252 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 1, 87; on Berlusconi, 246; Cameron and, 272; economic philosophy of, 73; on EFSF, 128–29; in election of 2012, 33–34; after flash crash, 25; on Greek debt restructuring, 119, 121, 307; on IMF, 297; meets with Berlusconi, 336; Merkel and, 28, 328–30; on Schuldenbremse, 149–50; Strauss-Kahn nominated as IMF director by, 22, 295–96; on Weber, 347–48 Sauvy, Alfred, 67 savings banks (Sparkassen), 160 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 6, 57, 69–70 Say’s Law, 69 Sberbank Europe AG, 283–84 Scandinavian Currency Union, 252 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 7; asssassination attempt against, 25; on Cyprus, 200, 341; in debate with Summers, 147; on deposit insurance, 221; Draghi and, 354; European Monetary Fund proposed by, 20, 297; on exiting from euro area, 228; Gaithner and, 263; on Greece, 232, 264–66; IMF and, 24; Outright Monetary Transactions supported by, 123; on saving eurp, 5; Varoufakis and, 231 Schengen agreement, 249 Schlesinger, Helmut, 325 Schmidt, Christoph, 64 Schmidt, Helmut, 48 Schmoller, Gustav, 58 Schröder, Gerhard, 146, 285 Schuldenbremse, 150 Schulz, Martin, 37 Scotland, 278 Scottish National Party (SNP), 278 secular stagnation, 143 Securities Markets Program (SMP), 335, 345–49 Seehofer, Horst, 63 Sen, Amartya, 73 Shafik, Nemat, 304 Shakespeare, William, 267, 383 short-term funding, 169–70 Sicily (Italy), 241 Siemens (firm), 49 Sikorski, Radek, 285 Single Bank Resolution Fund, 220, 221 Single European Act (1986), 22–23, 81 Single Resolution Mechanism, 220–21 Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM), 371–72 Sinn, Hans-Werner, 63, 228, 266, 325, 359 Sinn Fein (Irish party), 232 Slovakia, 130 small and medium enterprises (SMEs), 49 Smith, Adam, 57 Smithianismus, 58 Snowden, Edward, 269 Socialist Party (France), 35, 37, 46 Social Security Act (US; 1935), 102 Société Générale (French bank), 159, 166 Sohmen, Egon, 55 solidarity, 380 solvency, 116, 118–19; liquidity versus, 125–28, 215, 380 Sombart, Werner, 58 Sorel, Albert, 43–44 Soros, George, 81–82, 163, 265, 267 sovereign debt, 89; foreign owned, 214; IMF on, 291–95; liquidity risk and, 332–33; restructuring of, 126–27 Sovereign Debt Reduction Mechanism (SDRM), 294 Soviet Union, 47 Spain: bank mergers in, 174; capital flows to, 167–68; diabolic loop in, 183; direct recapitalization of banks in, 196–97; ECB and, 94, 336; economic stimulus in, 148; ESM and, 353; euro crisis in, 31, 32; European Parliament elections in, 36; GDP boost in, 118; during global financial crisis, 261–62; IMF and, 310; inflation rate in, 178; national debt of, 121, 127–28; under Philip II, 96; Podemos in, 232; sovereign debt of, 224; zombie banks in, 189 special drawing rights (SDRs), 132–33, 281, 292; IMF and, 307–9 special purpose vehicle (SPV), 25 Spielberg, Steven, 45 spillover risk, 180–82 Spitzenkandidaten, 376 Sraffa, Piero, 11, 238 Staatswissenschaft, 57 Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), 28–29, 86, 92, 99; German attempts to repair, 148–50; negotiations leading to, 135–36; rules of, 146 Stark, Jürgen, 87, 135, 301, 350 Steinbrück, Peer, 163 Steinnson, Jon, 142 Stiglitz, Joseph, 73, 250 stimulus, debate over austerity versus, 148–54 Strauss-Kahn, Dominique, 73; arrest and resignation of, 304–5; during Greek crises, 298; as IMF managing director, 22, 260, 288, 295–96, 307; in troika, 301, 303, 304 stress tests for banks, 217, 254–55 structural conditionality, 301 subsidiary sovereign debts, 121 Süddeutsche Zeitung (newspaper), 64 Suharto, 293 Summers, Lawrence, 143, 144, 147, 151 Svensson, Lars, 53 Sweden, 381 Syrian refugee crisis, 39–40, 285–86, 382 Syriza party (Greece), 38, 152–53, 231, 232, 342 systemic risk, 180–82, 388 Szász, André, 85 tail risk, 389–90 TARGET2, 226–27, 302, 307, 323–25; Greece and, 343 targeted longer-term refinancing operations (TLTROs), 352, 360, 366 taxes: on Cypriot bank deposits, 199; in Cyprus, 340; financial transactions taxes, 205; in Ireland, 338 Taylor, John, 311 technological liquidity, 161 temporary monopoly rents, 203–4 terrorism, 36, 382 Tesobono crisis (Mexico), 292 Thatcher, Margaret, 92, 273; on single European market, 274; TINA (There Is No Alternative) principle of, 145 Thorning-Schmidt, Helle, 272 Tietmeyer, Hans, 132, 212, 316, 369 time-inconsistency problem, 87–88 TINA (There Is No Alternative) principle, 145 Tirole, Jean, 72 Tobin, James, 188 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 42, 43 Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe, 242 transfer unions, 106–11 Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, 27, 220, 316 Tremonti, Giulio, 335 Trichet, Jean-Claude, 94; on Deauville agreement, 30; as ECB president, 316–18; on ECB’s price stability mandate, 320; on European Union, 374; Greek debt and, 304; on IMF, 23, 327–28; on Ireland, 338, 339; on Italy, 246; on private sector involvement, 329–31; on purchasing government bonds, 345; replaced by Draghi, 349–50; on unity of euro areas, 170 trilemma of international macroeconomics, 75–76 troika (European Commission, IMF, and ECB; the institutions), 25, 328; Greek adjustment program and, 334; IMF in, 300–304 Trump, Donald, 256 Tsipras, Alexis: at Brussels meeting, 266; elected prime minister of Greece, 342; in Greek election of 2014, 231; on IMF, 311–12; referendum called by, 232; Soros and, 267 Tusk, Donald, 20, 27, 275 UKIP Party, 276 Ukraine, 36, 284; conflict between Russia and, 285–86, 381; debts of, 295 unemployment: countries with high rates of, 108–9; Euro-wide unemployment insurance, 101–3 Unicredit (Italian bank), 215 unions, 51–53 United Kingdom, 241; Anglo-Saxon financial capitalism in, 162–63; under Brown, 267–70; under Cameron, 270–72; on ECB intervention, 131; economic theory in, 375; European Parliament elections in, 37; gold standard used by, 90–91; Icelandic assets seized by, 213; on IMF board, 296, 305; national debt of, 121; nineteenth-century economic philosophy in, 58; not in euro area, 249; reputation in monetary policy of, 91–92; threatened exit from European Union by, 272–79; withdraws from European Exchange Rate Mechanism, 82 United States: Anglo-Saxon financial capitalism in, 162–63; bankruptcies in, 256–59; banks and capital market in, 159; bilateral operation with Mexico, 21; divisions on economic theory in, 375; dollar currency of, 46–47; economic history of, 251–54; economic perspective of, 249–51; euro crisis and, 261–67; federal assumption of states’ debts in, 110–11; Federal Reserve System in, 95, 314; Greek exit and, 230; housing bubble in, 170; on IMF board, 296; international inflation tied to, 55; labor mobility in, 104; Landesbanken investments in, 165; New Deal programs in, 102; as polarizing influence, 286; Treasury bonds of, 224, 361 universal banking, 159–60 unsecured interbank markets, 164 Uruguay, 295 Valls, Manuel, 35, 182 vampire banks, 189, 205 Van Rompuy, Herman, 20, 23, 122, –219 Varoufakis, Yanis, 231, 233, 267, 342 Vesti, 239–40 Vienna initiative, 21 Vietnam War, 55 VLTROs (very long-term refinancing operations), 345–46, 349–52, 357 volatility paradox, 104, 182 Voltaire, 124 von Mises, Ludwig, 65 von Rompuy, Herman, 151, 304 wages, 106–7 Wagner, Adolph, 58 Waigel, Theo, 135 Walters, Alan, 79 Warsh, Kevin, 363 Washington Consensus, 79, 290 Weber, Axel: on IMF, 297; on monetary targeting, 53; resignation of, 345, 348; on Secondary Market Purchase program, 25; on Securities Markets Program, 347 Weber, Max, 2, 4 Weidmann, Jens: Bundesbank president, 307; as Bundesbank president, 132; Draghi and, 354; on European Union vulnerabilites, 66; on Goethe, 356–57; on IMF, 22; on VLTROs, 350 Weimar Republic, 44, 46; Great Inflation in, 54–55; Hayek on, 59 Welcker, Carl Theodor, 57–58 West LB (German bank), 165 White, Harry Dexter, 288–91 wholesale funding, 163–64 William III (king, England), 88 Wolf, Martin, 151, 268 World Bank, 269, 288 Wren-Lewis, Simon, 250 Xi Jinping, 275, 282 Yugoslavia, 47 Zapatero, José Luis, 23, 261–62, 336 zero lower bound (ZLB), 140, 364 Zhejiang Geely Group (Chinese firm), 282 Zhou Xiaochuan, 281 zombie banks, 188, 189, 205


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Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

The Chinese experience does raise several interesting questions about the future of Chinese growth and, more important, the desirability and viability of authoritarian growth. Such growth has become a popular alternative to the “Washington consensus,” which emphasizes the importance of market and trade liberalization and certain forms of institutional reform for kick-starting economic growth in many less developed parts of the world. While part of the appeal of authoritarian growth comes as a reaction to the Washington consensus, perhaps its greater charm—certainly to the rulers presiding over extractive institutions—is that it gives them free rein in maintaining and even strengthening their hold on power and legitimizes their extraction.

The first, often advocated by international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, recognizes that poor development is caused by bad economic policies and institutions, and then proposes a list of improvements these international organizations attempt to induce poor countries to adopt. (The Washington consensus makes up one such list.) These improvements focus on sensible things such as macroeconomic stability and seemingly attractive macroeconomic goals such as a reduction in the size of the government sector, flexible exchange rates, and capital account liberalization. They also focus on more microeconomic goals, such as privatization, improvements in the efficiency of public service provision, and perhaps also suggestions as to how to improve the functioning of the state itself by emphasizing anticorruption measures.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

It had ordered massive new spending and lending that pushed China’s growth rate back up to near double digits in 2010, a year when the United States barely grew at all. Talk of the new Beijing Consensus implied that many countries had come to see the virtues of an active, authoritarian hand guiding the economy, and that this new view was displacing the old Washington Consensus, in support of freedom in markets, trade, and politics. “The Rise of State Capitalism” was the theme of a number of new books and magazine covers in 2011. I watched all this with great skepticism. For one thing, it was mainly the European and American political and business elites who were marveling about China, not their peers in emerging nations.

A year before, in the Egyptian seaside town of Sharm el-Sheikh, I had met with Gamal Mubarak, son of his country’s soon-to-be-deposed dictator. When I asked him whether his country would back off from the nascent liberalization process that his government was belatedly undertaking, he responded that the future was still in liberalizing the economy, along the lines of the Washington Consensus, because his country had learned from hard experience that state control doesn’t work. In India, my home country, the talk in business circles was not about the Beijing Consensus, either. It was about the growing power of the middlemen who hold court in the Tea Lounge of the Taj Mansingh, an iconic hotel in the heart of Delhi, the national capital.

., 259, 304, 310 technology: automation, 214 cycle of, 8, 124, 218–21 driverless cars, 54 and immigration, 51–52 investment in, 218–21, 229, 233, 255 and jobs, 101, 211, 212 and leisure time, 199 and productivity, 20, 51, 119, 220–21 robot workers, 27, 36, 54–57, 214 and service businesses, 210, 211–13 3-D printing, 8, 214 Tetlock, Philip, 400 Thailand, 47–48, 189–90 capital flight from, 272, 292 commodities economy in, 342, 379 credit binge in, 199, 297, 298–302, 306, 315, 328, 380 currency of, 217, 267, 271–73, 273, 285–86, 292 economic contraction in, 286, 349, 379 economic growth in, 79, 217, 256, 348, 380 economic recovery of, 288, 302, 325, 327 and hype, 330, 349 infrastructure in, 207–8, 230 and international trade, 174, 178, 179–80, 216 investment in, 206, 217, 225, 230–31 leadership in, 78–79, 97, 379–80 manufacturing in, 216–17, 225, 227, 379 military coup in (2014), 379–80 population growth rates in, 30, 47 social unrest in, 78–79, 189, 190, 217 state banks in, 151, 321, 323–24 Thatcher, Margaret, 64–65, 68, 94 Thiel, Peter, 104, 119, 125 thrift, 16, 277–79 Time, 331, 334–35, 347, 349, 350, 352 tourism, 2, 37, 199, 211, 288, 384–85 trade balance, 269 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, 173, 179 Trans-Pacific Partnership, 173, 178, 361, 377, 378, 383, 384, 386 Trudeau, Justin, 386 Trump, Donald, 53, 364 Tsai Ing-wen, 383 Tunisia, 91–92, 224 Turkey, 190, 326 currency of, 273–74, 280, 283, 291, 292, 293, 396 debt of, 291, 306, 327, 328 economic growth in, 66, 69, 72 financial deepening in, 327 government spending in, 139, 247–48 hype about, 345, 348 immigration to, 48 inflation in, 241, 242, 246, 247–50, 326 leadership in, 60, 66, 71–72, 74, 349, 395 and location, 395–96 per capita income in, 68, 331, 348 population growth in, 31 populist nationalism in, 60, 72, 247 reforms in, 67–68, 72, 248, 249, 331 social unrest in, 4, 61, 72, 73, 74 wealth in, 114, 116, 120 Tusk, Donald, 74–75 Uganda, 87, 181, 354–55 United Arab Emirates, 167, 170 United Kingdom, see Britain United Nations (UN), 10, 47 on population growth, 19, 25, 27, 33, 44–45 United States, 194–95, 360–64 billionaires in, 107, 108, 114, 116, 118–19, 121, 123–25, 364 birth rate in, 26 checks and balances in, 364 credit markets in, 13, 298, 303–4, 305–6, 316 currency of, 266, 271, 272, 362–63 current account deficit in, 278, 362–63 debt in, 363 economic growth in, 3, 288, 337–38, 340 economic recovery in, 24, 64–65, 102, 360 economic strength of, 266, 400 financial speculation in, 102 and geopolitics, 172–73 and global trade, 184, 185, 402–3 government spending in, 138, 139 and hype, 361–62 and immigration, 45, 49–50, 52, 53, 360 industrialization in, 144, 215 inflation in, 240–41, 258 infrastructure in, 207, 208 life expectancy in, 39, 40 and location, 176–77, 200 long boom of, 255–56 manufacturing in, 204, 213, 214, 215, 361 oil and gas in, 228–29, 362 per capita income in, 32, 66, 339, 346 polarization in, 62–63, 132, 363–64 productivity in, 20, 51–52, 220–21, 257, 303 recessions originating in, 2, 132, 303–4, 305–6, 308–9, 327–28, 362 and regional alliances, 173–75, 178, 183, 188, 199, 361, 383, 384, 386 “second term curse” in, 70–71 technology in, 20, 218, 221, 294, 303, 361–62 Treasury bonds, 280 Washington Consensus, 132–33 and wealth gap, 101, 102, 364 workforce in, 19, 32, 37, 41–42, 43–44, 360 Uribe, Álvaro, 77, 183, 350 Uruguay, 300 Velasco, Juan, 98 Venezuela, 4, 158 economic cycle in, 87, 346, 365 leadership in, 64, 69, 76, 77, 98, 365 oil in, 333, 334 and regional alliances, 182, 366 Vietnam, 42, 202 billionaires in, 118 Communist Party in, 377–78 currency in, 295 fiscal deficit in, 377 and global trade, 174, 176–78, 180, 295 hype about, 345 inflation in, 378 investment in, 378 leadership in, 90–91 location of, 168, 177–78, 185, 378 manufacturing in, 213, 378 per capita income in, 178, 378 population centers in, 190, 191, 199 Viravaidya, Mechai, 47 Volcker, Paul, 241, 245, 335 wage-price spiral, 240 Walton family, 119 Wang Jianlin, 114 wealth: balance in, 103 billionaire lists, 100, 103, 104, 116, 117, 120–21 and capital flight, 52–53, 107, 279–81, 292 creation of, 99, 103, 115 crony capitalism, 105–6, 112, 130, 332 of entrepreneurs, 118–19, 122 in family empires/inherited, 104, 116–21 measures of, 101 redistribution of, 95, 96–98, 99, 101, 126 of robber barons, 124 scale of, 107–10 and state meddling, 127–29 wealth gap, 95–96, 99–102, 364 and corruption, 127–29 and easy money, 101–2, 108 and economic declines, 125–27 rise of, 129–31 welfare states, 64, 65, 93, 97, 126, 138, 140–41 Wen Jiabao, 307, 308, 311–12 Widodo, Joko, 143, 157, 163, 376–77 Wiesel, Elie, 331–32 wildebeest, survival of, viii, ix, xi women: and birth rates, 18, 25–26, 28, 33–36, 43, 44, 47, 392 economic restrictions on, 42 education of, 26, 41 working, 28, 34, 35, 36, 40–44, 47 workforce: aging, 392 and available jobs, 32, 37, 55 and baby bonuses, 33–36 and economic growth, 24, 26, 52 global, 55–56 growth rate in, 28–32 highly skilled, 48–54 hours worked by, 18 and immigration, 28, 44–54 manual labor, 213 new people in, 28, 36, 57 participation rate in, 36–37 and pension funds, 279 and population declines, 24–32, 35, 38, 43, 44, 56 and productivity data, 18–19, 39 replaced by machines, 16, 24 and retirement, 36–40 robots in, 54–57 skilled, 48–54 wages, 101, 184, 185, 204, 214, 243, 257 women in, 28, 34, 35, 36, 40–44, 47 World Bank: on convergence, 339, 341 data set of, 407 on economic growth factors, 12, 18, 342, 346 forecasting record of, 336, 338 on inflation, 242 on infrastructure, 186, 187 on middle-income trap, 345 on new business, 48 on service sector, 210–11 Spence Commission, 341–42 on wealth gap, 100 on workforce, 42, 51 world economy, 358–401 absence of optimism in, 359 combined scores of, 358–59 crisis (2008), see global financial crisis disruptions of, 358–59 potential growth rate of, 359 world maps, 356–57, 402–3 see also specific nations World Trade Organization, 177 Wu Jinglian, 314 Xiao Gang, 311 Xi Jinping, 120, 156, 187, 208 Yellen, Janet, 101 Yeltsin, Boris, 67, 242 Yemen, 92 Yudhoyono, Susilo Bambang (SBY), 93, 157 Zambia, 96, 354 Zambrano, Lorenzo, 219–20 Zeihan, Peer, 184 Zielinski, Robert, The Kiss of Debt, 297–98, 299, 323 Zimbabwe, 86, 88–89, 96–97, 373 Zoellick, Robert, 242 “zombie companies,” 318–19 Zong Qinghou, 113 Zuckerberg, Mark, 104, 119, 124 Zuma, Jacob, 352, 397 ALSO BY RUCHIR SHARMA Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ruchir Sharma is head of emerging markets and chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, with more than $20 billion of assets under management.


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

Building the Governments We Need: The Big Picture The question of what kind of political system best supports economic growth and social well-being is, of course, highly controversial. In the 1980s and 90s political thinking in both the developed and developing world focused on the role of free markets in driving economic prosperity and political freedom. Global economic development was guided largely by the “Washington Consensus,” a view of the world that focused overwhelmingly on the power of free markets to drive growth. The Consensus led influential bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to push developing countries to enact far-reaching deregulation and privatization, to open domestic markets to global trade, and to permit free capital flows as roots of development—all without explicit attention to the health of local political or social institutions.

The Consensus led influential bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to push developing countries to enact far-reaching deregulation and privatization, to open domestic markets to global trade, and to permit free capital flows as roots of development—all without explicit attention to the health of local political or social institutions. It’s now clear that this was a mistake. Empirically, many of the states that implemented the Washington Consensus failed to do as well as expected. In post-Soviet Russia in particular, the rapid liberalization of markets was followed by a descent into an extreme form of crony capitalism, while the so-called Asian tigers—especially Taiwan, Singapore, and the Republic of Korea—found economic success by pairing the development of their own markets with heavy government intervention.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

In 1989, the cold war ended, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Washington Consensus was announced in a seminal article by John Williamson, an English economist working in Washington, D.C. Williamson’s article summarized views that had been evolving since the 1970s. He condensed these views into a playbook for a newly globalized world. Williams called for free trade, open capital accounts, direct foreign investment, and protection of intellectual property. He also called for fiscal discipline, yet in practice this was reserved for emerging markets, and not followed by developed economies themselves. The Washington Consensus was enforced ruthlessly throughout the 1990s by the IMF, urged on by Bob Rubin’s U.S.


pages: 376 words: 109,092

Paper Promises by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, paradox of thrift, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, tulip mania, value at risk, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In the 1980s and 1990s, sovereign debt crises forced governments to turn to the International Monetary Fund. The demise of the Bretton Woods system had caused the fund to remake itself as an emergency provider of finance to the developing world. These loans often carried strict conditions that reflected what was known as the ‘Washington consensus’, in favour of free markets and reduced public spending. The negotiations between governments and the fund carried an echo of the ‘bankers’ ramp’ that Britain faced in 1931. Governments that followed the IMF prescriptions faced street protests and were often accused of selling out to Western creditors.

Rubin, Robert Rueff, Jacques Rumsfeld, Donald Russia Sack, Alexander St Augustine Saint-Simon, duc de Salamis (city) Santelli, Rick Sarkozy, Nicholas Saudi Arabia savings savings glut Sbrancia, Belen Schacht, Hjalmar Scholes, Myron shale gas Second Bank of the United States Second World War Securities and Exchange Commission seignorage Shakespeare, William share options Shiller, Robert short-selling silver Singapore Sloan, Alfred Smith, Adam Smith, Fred Smithers & Co Smithsonian agreement Snowden, Philip Socialist Party of Greece social security Société Générale solidus Solon of Athens Soros, George sound money South Africa South Korea South Sea bubble sovereign debt crisis Soviet Union Spain special drawing right speculation, speculators Stability and Growth pact stagnation Standard & Poor’s sterling Stewart, Jimmy Stiglitz, Joseph stock markets stop-go cycle store of value Strauss-Kahn, Dominque Strong, Benjamin sub-prime lending Suez canal crisis Suharto, President of Indonesia Sumerians supply-side reforms Supreme Court (US) Sutton, Willie Sweden Swiss franc Swiss National Bank Switzerland Sylla, Richard Taiwan Taleb, Nassim Nicholas taxpayers Taylor, John tea party (US) Temin, Peter Thackeray, William Makepeace Thailand Thatcher, Margaret third world debt crisis Tiernan, Tommy Times Square, New York tobacco as currency treasury bills treasury bonds Treaty of Versailles trente glorieuses Triana, Pablo Triffin, Robert Triffin dilemma ‘trilemma’ of currency policy Truck Act True Finn party Truman, Harry S tulip mania Turkey Turner, Adair Twain, Mark unit of account usury value-at-risk (VAR) Vanguard Vanity Fair Venice Vietnam War vigilantes, bond market Viniar, David Volcker, Paul Voltaire Wagner, Adolph Wall Street Wall Street Crash of 1929 Wal-Mart wampum Warburton, Peter Warren, George Washington consensus Weatherstone, Dennis Weimar inflation Weimar Republic Weinberg, Sidney West Germany whales’ teeth White, Harry Dexter William of Orange Wilson, Harold Wirtschaftswunder Wizard of Oz, The Wolf, Martin Women Empowering Women Woodward, Bob Woolley, Paul World Bank Wriston, Walter Xinhua agency Yale University yen yield on debt yield on shares Zambia zero interest rates Zimbabwe Zoellick, Robert Philip Coggan is the Buttonwood columnist of the Economist.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

Now Wall Street was failing and President Bush was promising that the US Treasury would come to the rescue. But was the United States in a fit state to respond? “[T]he present intervention,” Fernández pointed out, was not just “the largest in memory,” it was being “made by a State with an incredible trade and fiscal deficit.”4 If this was to stand, then the “Washington Consensus” of fiscal and monetary discipline to which so much of the emerging world had been subjected was clearly dead. “It was a historic opportunity to review behaviour and policies.” Nor was it just Latin American resentment on display. The Europeans joined the chorus. “The world is no longer a unipolar world with one super-Power, nor is it a bipolar world with the East and the West.

Policy experts on both continents were focused on fiscal discipline and international competitiveness, supply side incentives, efficient government spending, deficits, evidence-based welfare policy, education reform and flexible labor markets. These were the shibboleths of the watered-down, supply-side market economics inherited from the days of Reagan and Thatcher and the Washington Consensus of the 1990s. The policy communities on both sides of the Atlantic also shared blind spots. Sharing a deep faith in markets, neither realized the threat posed by the new, market-based model of banking. On both sides of the Atlantic they were oblivious to the risks accumulating in overleveraged banks, relying on vast quantities of wholesale funding.

At the G20 in Seoul in November 2010 they had lambasted Bernanke for adopting QE2, dropping US interest rates and allowing the dollar to slide. By 2013 many emerging markets had gone beyond the war of words to adopt capital controls. Brazil, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia all took steps to slow the inflow of funds and curb the appreciation of their currencies. Fifteen years earlier in the heyday of the “Washington consensus” this would have put them beyond the pale. Restraining international capital movement was a retreat from the most fundamental liberalizing policy of the 1970s and 1980s. But the advocates of the market revolution had foreseen neither the emerging market crises of the 1990s nor monetary policy on the scale of QE.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

For starters, thanks to the integration of the world economy, the dependence of any one country on supplies, customers, or financing from any one other country has loosened enormously. Falling trade barriers and more open capital markets were long-held goals of the United States and other rich nations in international trade talks. Their victory—along with the widespread promotion of the “Washington consensus” as a condition for lending by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other institutions—has had the paradoxical effect of weakening the hold that the United States or former colonial powers like Britain and France once had over countries in their sphere of influence. The imposition of sanctions against Iran in an effort to bring its nuclear program into compliance with international regimes is the exception that proves the rule.

See also Banks; Occupy Wall Street movement Wall Street Journal, 6, 174, 212 Waltz, Julie, 145 Wars, 10, 16, 17, 28, 42, 48, 111, 115, 135, 243 asymmetric/irregular wars, 5, 108, 109–114, 124 generations of warfare, 116–118 rules of war, 121–128 See also Conflict; Cyber-crime/warfare; individual wars Warsaw Pact, 139, 141, 142. See also Soviet Union: ex-Soviet bloc Washington Consensus, 144 Washington Post, 28, 95, 162, 200 Watergate, 68 Wealth, 6–7, 8, 13, 15, 42, 46, 48, 49–50, 130, 167, 195, 197, 198, 207, 210, 236. See also Billionaires Weapons, 44, 54, 110, 116, 118–121, 141, 144, 149 precision weapons, 111–112 See also Nuclear issues Weber, Max, 38–42, 43, 47, 50, 52, 75, 76, 79, 103, 115, 116 Weiss, Gary, 190 Wells, Peter, 166 Welzel, Christian, 67 Westinghouse, 36 White Collar: The American Middle Classes (Mills), 47 White House, 76 White people, 67 Who Rules America?


pages: 492 words: 118,882

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

If you could not believe in free markets and the appropriate allocation of risk when everyone else was, then what could you believe in? This ideological kidnapping of economic theory, market policies, and societal mindsets occurred due to a monetary thought experiment now referred to as the Washington Consensus. Under this ideology, market discipline and self-regulation would be sufficient to ward off any serious problems in financial institutions, and if left to itself, the financial system would not only allocate resources more efficiently, but also redistribute risks better. Not only was this belief widespread, it was also contagious—the IMF, the World Bank, the Federal Reserve, the ECB, and the Bank of England were all infected by the same belief system (Ülgen, 2015).

Not only was this belief widespread, it was also contagious—the IMF, the World Bank, the Federal Reserve, the ECB, and the Bank of England were all infected by the same belief system (Ülgen, 2015). Hence, Lehman Brothers and AIG became TBTF because it was inconceivable that they could fail (Admati and Hellwig, 2013). As it can be inferred from the term, the Washington Consensus, the growth of TBTF finds its roots in the annals of an American financial history story. Owing to the popularity and acceptance of financialization, over the past 40 years, the notion that oversight of the financial industry was unnecessary was entrenched in society. In 1998, Alan Greenspan stated that, “participants in financial markets are predominantly professionals that simply do not require the customer protections that may be needed by the general public.”


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

The neoliberal and neocolonial imposition of these structural adjustment programs became known as “debt dictatorship,” with developing economies forced to accept severe austerity packages that stripped away social safety measures while increasing capitalist investment and trade tariffs. Naomi Klein summarizes this prescription of the Washington Consensus as “Want to save your country? Sell it off.”10 For the more than seventy countries across the Global South and former Eastern bloc trapped in these neoliberal programs, structural adjustment has been synonymous with increased interest rates, currency devaluation, elimination of state subsidies for domestic industries and essential services, deregulation, export-oriented markets, and swelling poverty rates.11 A mantra of neoliberal deregulation is the privatization of profit and socialization of risk.

See also Customs and Border Protection arrests by, 39, 68 Department of Homeland Security and, 55 Department of Labor and, 35 formation of, 33 US Border Patrol Tactical Unit, 3 US–Canada Safe Third Country Agreement, 88–89 US-Canadian border, 34, 57, 89 US Green Berets, 39 US Marine Corps, 180 US Marshals Service, 81 US-Mexico border, 3, 46 asylum and, 20 Black movement over, 29 detention at, 19, 33, 44, 52, 90–91 drones and, 55, 77 formation of, 19, 21–23, 36 maquiladoras and, 63 Tohono O’odham land and, 77–78 US Strategy for Engagement in Central America, 89 US Sugar Company, 135 US Supreme Court, 24, 28, 32 Utah, 23 V Valeria, Angie, 2, 19 Valletta Summit, 109, 121 Vancouver, 1 Verma, Gita Dewan, 67 Vial refugee camp, 114 Victorian Act, 96 Viennese Citizen’s Initiatives, 185 Viet Cong, 47 Vietnam, 119, 136 Vietnam War, 37, 39–41, 44, 47 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, 53 Vishwa Hindu Parishad, 175 Vogl, Anthea, 98 Vox, 183 Vucjak refugee camp, 116 W Wackenhut, 55 Waiãapi, Emyra, 181 Walcott, Rinaldo, 28, 159 Walmart, 61 Wang, Jackie, 82 Warsaw, 185 Washington, 135 Washington Consensus, 64 West Bank, 57, 69, 172, 177 Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, 45 West Sahel Project, 112 Wet’suwet’en movement, 210 White Australia, 4, 92, 95, 96, 98, 100, 102, 104 White, Ralston, 156 Whole Foods, 201, 214 Wilders, Geert, 187 Wilderson, Frank, 30 Wilson, Woodrow, 33 Wolfe, Patrick, 25 Women in Migration Network, 145 Woods, Clyde, 45 Woods, Tryon P., 126 Woomera detention center, 102–103 Workingmen’s Party of California, 204 World Anti-Communist League, 41 World Bank, 49, 62–65, 70, 143–144 World Cup, 152 World Health Organization, 10 World War I, 132 World War II, 21, 35, 132, 134, 164 Wyoming, 23 Y Yapu, David, 94 Yaqui people, 25 Yemen, 55, 60, 121, 149, 151 Yugoslavia, 133 Z Zaghawa people, 94 Zambia, 71 Zapatistas, 51 Zapotec people, 51 Zara, 61 Zelaya, José Manuel, 45 Zimbabwe, 214 Zionism, 171–178, 175, 201, 209 Zuboff, Shoshana, 80 About the Author Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013).


pages: 131 words: 41,052

Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century by Mark Leonard

Berlin Wall, Celtic Tiger, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, global reserve currency, Global Witness, invisible hand, knowledge economy, mass immigration, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, one-China policy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension reform, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, shareholder value, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus

This contract means that the state provides the resources for educating its citizens, treating their illnesses, providing childcare so they can work, and integration lessons for newcomers. In exchange, citizens take training, are more flexible, and newcomers integrate themselves. The ‘Stockholm Consensus’ stands in opposition to much of the waste of the ‘Washington Consensus’: low levels of inequality allow Europeans to save on crime and prison; energy-efficient economies protect them from hikes in oil prices; the social contract gives people leisure and a helping hand back into work if they lose their jobs; while the European single market and the euro will allow European countries to benefit from economies of scale in a global market without giving up on the adaptability and dynamism that come from being small.


pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

The emerging market crises were partly defused by interventions from the International Monetary Fund, which provided support through loans for countries, and, implicitly, the banks that had foolishly provided finance. The IMF imposed much-resented austerity programmes on Asian economies. The phrase ‘Washington consensus’ was widely used to describe the common set of neo-liberal economic policies that were conditions of their support. Privatisation and capital market liberalisation contributed to both national and international financialisation. The internet came to the educated public, and the financial community, in the 1990s.

.: Hyperion 220 Loomis, Carol 108 lotteries 65, 66, 68, 72 Lucas, Robert 40 Lynch, Dennios 108 Lynch, Peter 108, 109 M M-Pesa 186 Maastricht Treaty (1993) 243, 250 McCardie, Sir Henry 83, 84, 282, 284 McGowan, Harry 45 Machiavelli, Niccolò 224 McKinley, William 44 McKinsey 115, 126 Macy’s department store 46 Madoff, Bernard 29, 118, 131, 132, 177, 232, 293 Madoff Securities 177 Magnus, King of Sweden 196 Manhattan Island, New York: and Native American sellers 59, 63 Manne, Henry 46 manufacturing companies, rise of 45 Marconi 48 marine insurance 62, 63 mark-to-market accounting 126, 128–9, 320n22 mark-to-model approach 128–9, 320n21 Market Abuse Directive (MAD) 226 market economy 4, 281, 302, 308 ‘market for corporate control, the’ 46 market risk 97, 98, 177, 192 market-makers 25, 28, 30, 31 market-making 49, 109, 118, 136 Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MIFID) 226 Markkula, Mike 162, 166, 167 Markopolos, Harry 232 Markowitz, Harry 69 Markowitz model of portfolio allocation 68–9 Martin, Felix 323n5 martingale 130, 131, 136, 139, 190 Marx, Groucho 252 Marx, Karl 144, 145 Capital 143 Mary Poppins (film) 11, 12 MasterCard 186 Masters, Brooke 120 maturity transformation 88, 92 Maxwell, Robert 197, 201 Mayan civilisation 277 Meade, James 263 Means, Gardiner 51 Meeker, Mary 40, 167 Melamed, Leo 19 Mercedes 170 merchant banks 25, 30, 33 Meriwether, John 110, 134 Merkel, Angela 231 Merrill Lynch 135, 199, 293, 300 Merton, Robert 110 Metronet 159 Meyer, André 205 MGM 33 Microsoft 29, 167 middleman, role of the 80–87 agency and trading 82–3 analysts 86 bad intermediaries 81–2 from agency to trading 84–5 identifying goods and services required 80, 81 logistics 80, 81 services from financial intermediaries 80–81 supply chain 80, 81 transparency 84 ‘wisdom of crowds’ 86–7 Midland Bank 24 Milken, Michael 46, 292 ‘millennium bug’ 40 Miller, Bill 108, 109 Minuit, Peter 59, 63 Mises, Ludwig von 225 Mittelstand (medium-size business sector) 52, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172 mobile banking apps 181 mobile phone payment transfers 186–7 Modigliani-Miller theorem 318n9 monetarism 241 monetary economics 5 monetary policy 241, 243, 245, 246 money creation 88 money market fund 120–21 Moneyball phenomenon 165 monopolies 45 Monte Carlo casino 123 Monte dei Paschi Bank of Siena 24 Montgomery Securities 167 Moody’s rating agency 21, 248, 249, 313n6 moral hazard 74, 75, 76, 92, 95, 256, 258 Morgan, J.P. 44, 166, 291 Morgan Stanley 25, 40, 130, 135, 167, 268 Morgenthau, District Attorney Robert 232–3 mortality tables 256 mortgage banks 27 mortgage market fluctuation in mortgage costs 148 mechanised assessment 84–5 mortgage-backed securities 20, 21, 40, 85, 90, 100, 128, 130, 150, 151, 152, 168, 176–7, 284 synthetic 152 Mozilo, Angelo 150, 152, 154, 293 MSCI World Bank Index 135 muckraking 44, 54–5, 79 ‘mugus’ 118, 260 multinational companies, and diversification 96–7 Munger, Charlie 127 Munich, Germany 62 Munich Re 62 Musk, Elon 168 mutual funds 27, 108, 202, 206 mutual societies 30 mutualisation 79 mutuality 124, 213 ‘My Way’ (song) 72 N Napoleon Bonaparte 26 Napster 185 NASA 276 NASDAQ 29, 108, 161 National Economic Council (US) 5, 58 National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) 255 National Institutes of Health 167 National Insurance Fund (UK) 254 National Provincial Bank 24 National Science Foundation 167 National Westminster Bank 24, 34 Nationwide 151 Native Americans 59, 63 Nazis 219, 221 neo-liberal economic policies 39, 301 Netjets 107 Netscape 40 Neue Markt 170 New Deal 225 ‘new economy’ bubble (1999) 23, 34, 40, 42, 98, 132, 167, 199, 232, 280 new issue market 112–13 New Orleans, Louisiana: Hurricane Katrina disaster (2005) 79 New Testament 76 New York Stock Exchange 26–7, 28, 29, 31, 49, 292 New York Times 283 News of the World 292, 295 Newton, Isaac 35, 132, 313n18 Niederhoffer, Victor 109 NINJAs (no income, no job, no assets) 222 Nixon, Richard 36 ‘no arbitrage’ condition 69 non-price competition 112, 219 Norman, Montagu 253 Northern Rock 89, 90–91, 92, 150, 152 Norwegian sovereign wealth fund 161, 253 Nostradamus 274 O Obama, Barack 5, 58, 77, 194, 271, 301 ‘Obamacare’ 77 Occidental Petroleum 63 Occupy movement 52, 54, 312n2 ‘Occupy Wall Street’ slogan 305 off-balance-sheet financing 153, 158, 160, 210, 250 Office of Thrift Supervision 152–3 oil shock (1973–4) 14, 36–7, 89 Old Testament 75–6 oligarchy 269, 302–3, 305 oligopoly 118, 188 Olney, Richard 233, 237, 270 open market operations 244 options 19, 22 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 263 Osborne, George 328n19 ‘out of the money option’ 102, 103 Overend, Gurney & Co. 31 overseas assets and liabilities 179–80, 179 owner-managed businesses 30 ox parable xi-xii Oxford University 12 P Pacific Gas and Electric 246 Pan Am 238 Paris financial centre 26 Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards 295 partnerships 30, 49, 50, 234 limited liability 313n14 Partnoy, Frank 268 passive funds 99, 212 passive management 207, 209, 212 Patek Philippe 195, 196 Paulson, Hank 300 Paulson, John 64, 109, 115, 152, 191, 284 ‘payment in kind’ securities 131 payment protection policies 198 payments system 6, 7, 25, 180, 181–8, 247, 259–60, 281, 297, 306 PayPal 167, 168, 187 Pecora, Ferdinand 25 Pecora hearings (1932–34) 218 peer-to-peer lending 81 pension funds 29, 98, 175, 177, 197, 199, 200, 201, 208, 213, 254, 282, 284 pension provision 78, 253–6 pension rights 53, 178 Perkins, Charles 233 perpetual inventory method 321n4 Perrow, Charles 278, 279 personal financial management 6, 7 personal liability 296 ‘petrodollars’ 14, 37 Pfizer 96 Pierpoint Morgan, J. 165 Piper Alpha oil rig disaster (1987) 63 Ponzi, Charles 131, 132 Ponzi schemes 131, 132, 136, 201 pooled investment funds 197 portfolio insurance 38 Potts, Robin, QC 61, 63, 72, 119, 193 PPI, mis-selling of 296 Prebble, Lucy: ENRON 126 price competition 112, 219 price discovery 226 price mechanism 92 Prince, Chuck 34 private equity 27, 98, 166, 210 managers 210, 289 private insurance 76, 77 private sector 78 privatisation 39, 78, 157, 158, 258, 307 probabilistic thinking 67, 71, 79 Procter & Gamble 69, 108 product innovation 13 property and infrastructure 154–60 protectionism 13 Prudential 200 public companies, conversion to 18, 31–2, 49 public debt 252 public sector 78 Q Quandt, Herbert 170 Quandt Foundation 170 quantitative easing 245, 251 quantitative style 110–11 quants 22, 107, 110 Quattrone, Frank 167, 292–3 queuing 92 Quinn, Sean 156 R railroad regulation 237 railway mania (1840s) 35 Raines, Franklin 152 Rajan, Raghuram 56, 58, 79, 102 Rakoff, Judge Jed 233, 294, 295 Ramsey, Frank 67, 68 Rand, Ayn 79, 240 ‘random walk’ 69 Ranieri, Lew 20, 22, 106–7, 134, 152 rating agencies 21, 41, 84–5, 97, 151, 152, 153, 159, 249–50 rationality 66–7, 68 RBS see Royal Bank of Scotland re-insurance 62–3 Reagan, Ronald 18, 23, 54, 59, 240 real economy 7, 18, 57, 143, 172, 190, 213, 226, 239, 271, 280, 288, 292, 298 redundancy 73, 279 Reed, John 33–4, 48, 49, 50, 51, 242, 293, 314n40 reform 270–96 other people’s money 282–5 personal responsibility 292–6 principles of 270–75 the reform of structure 285–92 robust systems and complex structures 276–81 regulation 215, 217–39 the Basel agreements 220–25 and competition 113 the origins of financial regulation 217–19 ‘principle-based’ 224 the regulation industry 229–33 ‘rule-based’ 224 securities regulation 225–9 what went wrong 233–9 ‘Regulation Q’ (US) 13, 14, 20, 28, 120, 121 regulatory agencies 229, 230, 231, 235, 238, 274, 295, 305 regulatory arbitrage 119–24, 164, 223, 250 regulatory capture 237, 248, 262 Reich, Robert 265, 266 Reinhart, C.M. 251 relationship breakdown 74, 79 Rembrandts, genuine/fake 103, 127 Renaissance Technologies 110, 111, 191 ‘repo 105’ arbitrage 122 repo agreement 121–2 repo market 121 Reserve Bank of India 58 Reserve Primary Fund 121 Resolution Trust Corporation 150 retirement pension 78 return on equity (RoE) 136–7, 191 Revelstoke, first Lord 31 risk 6, 7, 55, 56–79 adverse selection and moral hazard 72–9 analysis by ‘ketchup economists’ 64 chasing the dream 65–72 Geithner on 57–8 investment 256 Jackson Hole symposium 56–7 Kohn on 56 laying bets on the interpretation of incomplete information 61 and Lloyd’s 62–3 the LMX spiral 62–3, 64 longevity 256 market 97, 98 mitigation 297 randomness 76 socialisation of individual risks 61 specific 97–8 risk management 67–8, 72, 79, 137, 191, 229, 233, 234, 256 risk premium 208 risk thermostat 74–5 risk weighting 222, 224 risk-pooling 258 RJR Nabisco 46, 204 ‘robber barons’ 44, 45, 51–2 Robertson, Julian 98, 109, 132 Robertson Stephens 167 Rockefeller, John D. 44, 52, 196 Rocket Internet 170 Rogers, Richard 62 Rogoff, K.S. 251 rogue traders 130, 300 Rohatyn, Felix 205 Rolls-Royce 90 Roman empire 277, 278 Rome, Treaty of (1964) 170 Rooney, Wayne 268 Roosevelt, Franklin D. v, 25, 235 Roosevelt, Theodore 43–4, 235, 323n1 Rothschild family 217 Royal Bank of Scotland 11, 12, 14, 24, 26, 34, 78, 91, 103, 124, 129, 135, 138, 139, 211, 231, 293 Rubin, Robert 57 In an Uncertain World 67 Ruskin, John 60, 63 Unto this Last 56 Russia defaults on debts 39 oligarchies 303 Russian Revolution (1917) 3 S Saes 168 St Paul’s Churchyard, City of London 305 Salomon Bros. 20, 22, 27, 34, 110, 133–4 ‘Salomon North’ 110 Salz Review: An Independent Review of Barclays’ Business Practices 217 Samuelson, Paul 208 Samwer, Oliver 170 Sarkozy, Nicolas 248, 249 Savage, L.J. 67 Scholes, Myron 19, 69, 110 Schrödinger’s cat 129 Scottish Parliament 158 Scottish Widows 26, 27, 30 Scottish Widows Fund 26, 197, 201, 212, 256 search 195, 209, 213 defined 144 and the investment bank 197 Second World War 36, 221 secondary markets 85, 170, 210 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 20, 64, 126, 152, 197, 225, 226, 228, 230, 232, 247, 292, 293, 294, 313n6 securities regulation 225–9 securitisation 20–21, 54, 100, 151, 153, 164, 169, 171, 222–3 securitisation boom (1980s) 200 securitised loans 98 See’s Candies 107 Segarra, Carmen 232 self-financing companies 45, 179, 195–6 sell-side analysts 199 Sequoia Capital 166 Shad, John S.R. 225, 228–9 shareholder value 4, 45, 46, 50, 211 Sharpe, William 69, 70 Shell 96 Sherman Act (1891) 44 Shiller, Robert 85 Siemens 196 Siemens, Werner von 196 Silicon Valley, California 166, 167, 168, 171, 172 Simon, Hermann 168 Simons, Jim 23, 27, 110, 111–12, 124 Sinatra, Frank 72 Sinclair, Upton 54, 79, 104, 132–3 The Jungle 44 Sing Sing maximum-security gaol, New York 292 Skilling, Jeff 126, 127, 128, 149, 197, 259 Slim, Carlos 52 Sloan, Alfred 45, 49 Sloan Foundation 49 small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), financing 165–72, 291 Smith, Adam 31, 51, 60 The Wealth of Nations v, 56, 106 Smith, Greg 283 Smith Barney 34 social security 52, 79, 255 Social Security Trust Fund (US) 254, 255 socialism 4, 225, 301 Société Générale 130 ‘soft commission’ 29 ‘soft’ commodities 17 Soros, George 23, 27, 98, 109, 111–12, 124, 132 South Sea Bubble (18th century) 35, 132, 292 sovereign wealth funds 161, 253 Soviet empire 36 Soviet Union 225 collapse of 23 lack of confidence in supplies 89–90 Spain: property bubble 42 Sparks, D.L. 114, 283, 284 specific risk 97–8 speculation 93 Spitzer, Eliot 232, 292 spread 28, 94 Spread Networks 2 Square 187 Stamp Duty 274 Standard & Poor’s rating agency 21, 99, 248, 249, 313n6 Standard Life 26, 27, 30 standard of living 77 Standard Oil 44, 196, 323n1 Standard Oil of New Jersey (later Exxon) 323n1 Stanford University 167 Stanhope 158 State Street 200, 207 sterling devaluation (1967) 18 stewardship 144, 163, 195–203, 203, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213 Stewart, Jimmy 12 Stigler, George 237 stock exchanges 17 see also individual stock exchanges stock markets change in organisation of 28 as a means of taking money out of companies 162 rise of 38 stock-picking 108 stockbrokers 16, 25, 30, 197, 198 Stoll, Clifford 227–8 stone fei (in Micronesia) 323n5 Stone, Richard 263 Stora Enso 196 strict liability 295–6 Strine, Chancellor Leo 117 structured investment vehicles (SIVs) 158, 223 sub-prime lending 34–5, 75 sub-prime mortgages 63, 75, 109, 149, 150, 169, 244 Summers, Larry 22, 55, 73, 119, 154, 299 criticism of Rajan’s views 57 ‘ketchup economics’ 5, 57, 69 support for financialisation 57 on transformation of investment banking 15 Sunday Times 143 ‘Rich List’ 156 supermarkets: financial services 27 supply chain 80, 81, 83, 89, 92 Surowiecki, James: The Wisdom of Crowds xi swap markets 21 SWIFT clearing system 184 Swiss Re 62 syndication 62 Syriza 306 T Taibbi, Matt 55 tailgating 102, 103, 104, 128, 129, 130, 136, 138, 140, 152, 155, 190–91, 200 Tainter, Joseph 277 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas 125, 183 Fooled by Randomness 133 Tarbell, Ida 44, 54 TARGET2 system 184, 244 TARP programme 138 tax havens 123 Taylor, Martin 185 Taylor Bean and Whitaker 293 Tea Party 306 technological innovation 13, 185, 187 Tel Aviv, Israel 171 telecommunications network 181, 182 Tesla Motors 168 Tetra 168 TfL 159 Thai exchange rate, collapse of (1997) 39 Thain, John 300 Thatcher, Margaret 18, 23, 54, 59, 148, 151, 157 Thiel, Peter 167 Third World debt problem 37, 131 thrifts 25, 149, 150, 151, 154, 174, 290, 292 ticket touts 94–5 Tobin, James 273 Tobin tax 273–4 Tolstoy, Count Leo 97 Tonnies, Ferdinand 17 ‘too big to fail’ 75, 140, 276, 277 Tourre, Fabrice ‘Fabulous Fab’ 63–4, 115, 118, 232, 293, 294 trader model 82, 83 trader, rise of the 16–24 elements of the new trading culture 21–2 factors contributing to the change 17–18 foreign exchange 18–19 from personal relationships to anonymous markets 17 hedge fund managers 23 independent traders 22–3 information technology 19–20 regulation 20 securitisation 20–21 shift from agency to trading 16 trading as a principal source of revenue and remuneration 17 trader model 82, 83 ‘trading book’ 320n20 transparency 29, 84, 205, 210, 212, 226, 260 Travelers Group 33, 34, 48 ‘treasure islands’ 122–3 Treasuries 75 Treasury (UK) 135, 158 troubled assets relief program 135 Truman, Harry S. 230, 325n13 trust 83–4, 85, 182, 213, 218, 260–61 Tuckett, David 43, 71, 79 tulip mania (1630s) 35 Turner, Adair 303 TWA 238 Twain, Mark: Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar 95–6 Twitter 185 U UBS 33, 134 UK Independence Party 306 unemployment 73, 74, 79 unit trusts 202 United States global dominance of the finance industry 218 house prices 41, 43, 149, 174 stock bubble (1929) 201 universal banks 26–7, 33 University of Chicago 19, 69 ‘unknown unknowns’ 67 UPS delivery system 279–80 US Defense Department 167 US Steel 44 US Supreme Court 228, 229, 304 US Treasury 36, 38, 135 utility networks 181–2 V value discovery 226–7 value horizon 109 Van Agtmael, Antoine 39 Vanderbilt, Cornelius 44 Vanguard 200, 207, 213 venture capital 166 firms 27, 168 venture capitalists 171, 172 Vickers Commission 194 Viniar, David 204–5, 233, 282, 283, 284 VISA 186 volatility 85, 93, 98, 103, 131, 255 Volcker, Paul 150, 181 Volcker Rule 194 voluntary agencies 258 W wagers and credit default swaps 119 defined 61 at Lloyd’s coffee house 71–2 lottery tickets 65 Wall Street, New York 1, 16, 312n2 careers in 15 rivalry with London 13 staffing of 217 Wall Street Crash (1929) 20, 25, 27, 36, 127, 201 Wall Street Journal 294 Wallenberg family 108 Walmart 81, 83 Warburg 134 Warren, Elizabeth 237 Washington consensus 39 Washington Mutual 135, 149 Wasserstein, Bruce 204, 205 Watergate affair 240 ‘We are the 99 per cent’ slogan 52, 305 ‘We are Wall Street’ 16, 55, 267–8, 271, 300, 301 Weber, Max 17 Weill, Sandy 33–4, 35, 48–51, 55, 91, 149, 293, 314n40 Weinstock, Arnold 48 Welch, Jack 45–6, 48, 50, 52, 126, 314n40 WestLB 169 Westminster Bank 24 Whitney, Richard 292 Wilson, Harold 18 windfall payments 14, 32, 127, 153, 290 winner’s curse 103, 104, 156, 318n11 Winslow Jones, Alfred 23 Winton Capital 111 Wolfe, Humbert 7 The Uncelestial City 1 Wolfe, Tom 268 The Bonfire of the Vanities 16, 22 women traders 22 Woodford, Neil 108 Woodward, Bob: Maestro 240 World Bank 14, 220 World.Com bonds 197 Wozniak, Steve 162 Wriston, Walter 37 Y Yellen, Janet 230–31 Yom Kippur War (1973) 36 YouTube 185 Z Zurich, Switzerland 62


pages: 550 words: 124,073

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century by Torben Iversen, David Soskice

Andrei Shleifer, assortative mating, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, confounding variable, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, full employment, general purpose technology, gentrification, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, implied volatility, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, means of production, middle-income trap, mirror neurons, mittelstand, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, passive investing, precariat, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban decay, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

The Puzzle of Varieties of Advanced Capitalism in an Age of Globalization A large literature, mainly in economics, has been devoted to the idea that there is a single optimal way—a best practice—of organizing economies to pursue growth or maximize GDP. At various stages, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, the OECD, the World Bank, and the IMF propagated these beliefs, sometimes referred to as the Washington Consensus.20 It might have been expected that advanced capitalist democracies would have seen convergence, especially in corporate governance, labor market rules, as well as institutions playing roles in training and in technology transfer. Moreover, advanced companies face broadly similar conditions in international product and financial markets, and with respect to overseas direct investment.

., 252 Tories, 87 trade: barriers to, 50, 114, 154, 285n5; competition and, 26, 31, 128, 131, 153–55, 218, 285n5, 285n9; democracy and, 258, 267; FDI and, 154, 163, 284n3, 285n5, 285n9; Fordism and, 114, 128, 131; free, 17, 155; knowledge economies and, 142, 145, 153–55, 163, 172–73, 180, 211–13, 218, 250; liberalism and, 51, 62, 142, 155, 163, 173, 213, 250, 284n3; NAFTA and, 155; open, 27, 154; populism and, 218, 250; protectionism and, 28, 41, 169; technology and, 3, 7, 31, 50, 128, 131, 142, 284n3 Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), 155–56 transport systems, 201–3 Trump, Donald, 130, 156, 211, 215, 218–20, 237, 243–45, 248, 276 Über, 265 undeserving poor, 43, 142, 160, 216, 222, 227 unemployment: automatic disbursements and, 133, 284n2; capitalism and, 51, 117, 172, 282n22; countercyclical policies and, 16; democracy and, 74–77, 92, 96; Fordism and, 105, 107, 110, 117, 120–21, 124–27, 133, 135, 284n2; knowledge economies and, 170–72, 174, 178, 180, 207, 248–49, 255–56, 285n8; social protection and, 51 unions: centralization and, 49, 53, 58, 63, 67, 69–70, 73, 96, 99, 101, 105, 107–10, 113, 116, 119, 122–23, 152, 156, 172, 174, 283n8; centralization/decentralization issues and, 49–50, 53, 58, 63, 67–70, 73, 96, 99, 101, 105–10, 113, 116, 119, 122–23, 152, 172, 174, 186, 283n8; competition and, 6, 33, 66, 68, 80, 96, 119, 152, 169–72, 177, 181, 186; craft, 61, 63, 67–71, 101, 172; democracy and, 53, 58–80, 90–92, 95–101, 274, 282n3, 283n8; exclusion of, 67, 70, 98; Fordism and, 105–16, 119–23, 127, 284n3; hostile takeovers and, 33; institutional frameworks and, 32–33; knowledge economies and, 152, 169–83, 212, 228, 251; laborist unionism and, 62; low-skilled labor and, 19, 47, 50, 66, 70–71, 96, 98–99, 119, 127, 181; polarized unionism and, 62; populism and, 228, 251; power and, 32, 66–67, 69, 73–76, 99, 105, 108, 112–13, 119, 169, 172, 186; predatory, 6; Rehn-Meidner model and, 19; segmented, 62, 105, 113; semiskilled labor and, 61, 64–65, 68–69, 105, 119–20, 123, 172–73; September Compromise and, 66; skilled labor and, 6, 19, 33, 47, 50, 53, 58, 60–71, 96–101, 105, 110, 119–20, 123, 127, 172–73, 176, 181, 186, 251; social democratic parties and, 6, 19, 61–63, 67–68, 72, 74, 76, 114, 181, 282n3; solidaristic, 62, 105, 172; strikes and, 73, 75, 108, 116; trade, 62–64, 170 United Kingdom: Blair and, 33, 171, 209; Brexit and, 130, 245, 248, 250, 276; British disease and, 172; British North American Act and, 87–88; Callaghan and, 169, 171; capitalism and, 10, 13, 19, 32, 38, 148, 152, 172, 206, 209; centralization and, 49; Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and, 169–70; Conservative Party and, 32, 81, 85, 88, 169, 218–19; democracy and, 38, 54–65, 73, 80–90, 277, 283n9; Disraeli and, 81, 85, 96; education and, 38, 130, 166, 177, 231–32, 277; enfranchisement and, 84–90; Fordism and, 105–8, 120, 123, 130; Forster Elementary Education Act and, 86; Gini coefficents for, 25, 36; Healey and, 169; health and, 204–5; Hyde Park Riots and, 85; inequality and, 36; knowledge economies and, 142, 147–48, 150, 152, 154, 161–63, 166, 169–77, 180–81, 194, 200–1, 204, 206, 209, 218, 232, 233, 236, 242, 245, 250; labor co-operation and, 152; laborist unionism and, 62; Labour Party and, 68, 169, 171; Liberals and, 32; Local Government Act and, 86; median income and, 25; modernization and, 19; Municipal Corporations Act and, 86; patents and, 27; populism and, 13, 218, 232, 233, 236, 242, 245, 250; postwar, 11; Prior and, 169–70; Public Health Acts and, 86; Reform Acts and, 56, 80–81, 85–86; Reform Party and, 88; segregation and, 200–3; settler colonies and, 84–90; taxes and, 17, 141, 206; Thatcher and, 33, 149, 163, 169–71, 182, 209; Tories and, 87; Victorian reformers and, 82; Whigs and, 80 United States: capitalism and, 13, 16–17, 24–25, 38, 47, 148, 152, 186, 209, 275, 277; Civil War and, 57; Clayton Act and, 153; Cold War and, 78, 111; decentralization and, 49; democracy and, 13, 24, 38, 55–57, 59, 62–64, 70, 83, 88, 96, 107, 147–48, 186, 215, 220, 275, 277; education and, 24, 38, 55, 70, 83, 109, 127, 130, 166, 177, 195, 223, 230–32, 241, 275; Fordism and, 105–9, 117–20, 123, 127, 130; inequality and, 24, 36, 42, 107, 117, 118, 123, 220, 282n22; knowledge economies and, 141–42, 147–56, 162, 166, 169, 171, 177, 186, 194–95, 198, 202, 209, 215, 218–23, 230, 232, 236, 241, 244, 277; labor market and, 56 (see also labor market); NAFTA and, 155; populism and, 13, 130, 171, 195, 215, 218–23, 230, 232, 236, 241, 244, 275; Sherman Act and, 153; taxes and, 16–17, 24, 42, 141; Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) and, 155–56 unskilled workers: democracy and, 62–63, 67–71, 96–97, 101; Fordism and, 104–5, 118; knowledge economies and, 193, 246, 255; populism and, 246, 255–56 upper class: capitalism and, 4, 6; democracy and, 35; education and, 43; as gaming the system, 222; global distribution and, 27–29; Great Gatsby Curve (GGC) and, 220, 221, 227–28, 247, 259, 275–76; inequality and, 41, 158, 261; political influence of, 24, 41–43, 253; populism and, 222, 227, 237, 253; skilled labor and, 43–44, 125; taxes and, 22, 42, 261, 280n13; voters and, 2 upskilling, 102, 123, 129, 174–75, 178, 228, 232, 250–51 urbanization, 37, 92; big-city agglomerations and, 194–200; effects of, 83–84; feeder towns and, 108–9, 224; knowledge economies and, 141, 194–95, 201–3, 224–27, 239, 241; rebirth of cities and, 224–27; segregation and, 200–6 (see also segregation); smart cities and, 194–95; transport systems and, 201–3 US Patent and Trademark Office, 26–27 value-added sectors, 206–9 Van Kersbergen, Kees, 44, 92, 95, 124 Verily Life Sciences, 262 Vernon, Raymond, 18 VET system, 176, 179–80 Vliet, Olaf van, 133 Vogel, Steven, 11 Von Hagen, Jürgen, 121, 151 Von Papen, Franz, 77 voters: advanced capitalism and, 2, 6, 11–14, 19–22, 30–32, 38, 46–47, 112, 158–59, 167, 215, 247, 273; aspirational, 6, 12–13, 20–21, 32, 167, 214, 219, 272; decisive, 2–3, 6, 11–14, 19–23, 32, 38, 43, 158–59; democracy and, 75, 81, 90, 96–100, 111–13, 125, 129–30, 133, 260, 272–73; economic, 164; education and, 12–13, 21, 38, 45, 90, 158, 164, 167–68, 219, 234, 247, 273; electoral politics and, 21–22, 46, 100, 111, 158, 183, 217, 272; growth and, 2, 13, 23, 32, 111, 113, 164, 168, 247; knowledge economies and, 24, 138, 140, 158–59, 163–64, 167–68, 183, 213–19, 234–36, 245, 247; median, 3, 21, 23, 44, 96–97, 100, 125, 168, 213; Meltzer-Richard model and, 3; middle class, 2–3, 20–22, 44, 90, 96–100, 125, 140, 158, 168, 273; mobilizing, 75; neoliberalism and, 2; politics of the future and, 272–73; populism and, 217–19, 234–36, 244–47, 250, 256; prospective, 164; PR systems and, 19, 34, 100, 217; redistribution and, 3, 19–21, 32, 43, 90, 98, 100, 125, 140, 158, 273; retrospective, 164; suffrage and, 72–74, 76, 80, 87–89; technology and, 6, 13, 20, 159, 234, 260, 272; upper class and, 2; welfare and, 3, 21–22, 43, 45–46, 111, 167, 214, 234, 273 wages: bargaining and, 49–50, 61, 105–10, 119–21, 127, 151, 172, 176; coordination and, 49–50, 106–7, 120, 123, 172, 229; cospecificity and, 49–50; democracy and, 266, 268, 273; Fordism and, 104–24, 127, 284n2; Great Gatsby Curve (GGC) and, 220, 221, 227–28, 247, 259, 275–76; knowledge economies and, 151, 160, 172–76, 181, 196, 211–12, 219, 222–23, 227, 229; monopoly, 6; populism and, 219, 222–23, 227, 229; restraint and, 18, 110, 113, 120–21, 151, 176, 211–12; skilled labor and, 6, 18, 33, 41, 50, 61, 64, 67, 104–5, 110, 115, 118–24, 127, 172–76, 181, 212, 222–23, 229, 266 Wajcman, Judy, 260 Wallerstein, Michael, 105 Washington Consensus, 38 Waymo, 265 Weimar Republic, 75–77 welfare: Bismarckian, 176; capitalism and, 8, 16–19, 31, 39–40, 46, 122, 125, 128, 131, 137, 167, 234, 261, 279n5, 282n22; cash transfers and, 21; competition and, 31, 40, 52, 122, 128, 131, 223, 285n6; cospecificity and, 49–50; democracy and, 94, 96, 261, 273; education and, 31, 42, 45, 52, 94, 96, 116, 128, 131, 146, 167, 223, 234, 261, 287n1; Fordism and, 110–11, 115–28, 131; free riders and, 127; Golden Age of, 127; inequality and, 3, 42, 125, 223, 282n22; Keynesianism and, 115; knowledge economies and, 137, 146, 167, 176, 214, 223, 234, 249, 285n6, 285n8, 287n1; labor market and, 31, 46, 96, 118, 120, 122–23, 125, 128, 176, 223, 279n5; populism and, 45, 223, 234, 249, 287n1; power resources theory and, 280n6; public services and, 21; redistribution and, 3, 8, 18–21, 31, 39–40, 43, 115, 123–24, 128, 131, 137, 261, 273; skilled labor and, 45; social insurance and, 21; taxes and, 16–17, 21, 40, 42, 167; trade protectionism and, 51; undeserving poor and, 43; voters and, 3, 21–22, 43, 45–46, 111, 167, 214, 234, 273; wage coordination and, 49–50 Westminster systems, 19 Whigs, 80 Winters, J.


pages: 756 words: 120,818

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

“Rheinish capitalism” refers to the European approach to corporate finance, which relies more heavily on the financing of business by banks than by debt and equity markets, on dual board structures, and on a lesser emphasis on mergers and acquisitions.33 In China, and more broadly in Asia, a homegrown approach to finance would probably take some time to crystallize, and its success would depend on the severity of a Chinese credit crunch. A third reason to involve China in a debt conference is geostrategic. China may wish to participate in a debt conference as a means of further opening itself up to international markets and of influencing debt restructuring in other economies across Asia. Equally, mindful of how the Washington Consensus (a liberal, promarket policy approach to countries that is associated with the IMF of the 1990s) has led many economies astray, China may prefer not to have the imprint of Western policy on its economy. For its part, the United States may have the strategic aim of bolstering the relevance of US-centric institutions such as the IMF, the dollar (the yuan-dollar relationship may become strained should China look to break its explicit link to the dollarized system), and dollar-centric capital markets.

In terms of power and its deployment, Europe is culturally very distinct, but it is not at all effective in the way it deploys either its diplomatic power or its military power, though one might argue that the European Union’s rather passive approach is a form of distinction. The United States, having led the contemporary wave of globalization, is distinctive in its own right. Its way of doing things has pervaded international institutions and policy mind-sets (the Washington Consensus). In each of the five factors it has a distinctive position, and in many of them a dominant one, with Europe edging the United States out in terms of the quality of its democratic processes. One challenge to the United States now comes in the deployment of its soft power, which was much more easily done in the context of postcommunist Europe and the early phase of rising emerging economies.


From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, classic study, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, New Urbanism, plutocrats, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, young professional

But even this power, rarely admired and mostly feared, leaked away steadily throughout the Cold War’s many cynical hot wars. Nor was it boosted by the downfall of the West’s communist rival. Blighted by the calamitous ‘war on terror’, it has been profoundly discredited by the collapse of the ‘Washington Consensus’, the West’s vaunted model of unregulated financial capitalism. Globalization, it is clear, does not lead to a flat world marked by increasing integration, standardization and cosmopolitan openness, despite the wishful thinking of some commentators. Rather, it reinforces tribalist affiliations, sharpens old antipathies, and incites new ones while unleashing a cacophony of competing claims.

Marxism-Leninism lies discredited and, though China’s rulers increasingly make gestures towards Confucian notions of harmony, China’s own legacy of ethical politics and socio-economic theory remains largely unexplored. And even if it is exportable to other Muslim countries, Turkey’s Islamic modernity doesn’t point to any alternative socio-economic order. The ‘Washington Consensus’ may lie in tatters, and Beijing’s Communist regime mocks – simply by persisting as long as it has – Western claims of victory in the Cold War and the inevitability of liberal democracy. But the ‘Beijing Consensus’ has even less universal application than its Washington counterpart; it sounds suspiciously like merely a cynical economic argument for the lack of political freedom.


pages: 518 words: 128,324

Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap by Graham Allison

9 dash line, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, facts on the ground, false flag, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, game design, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, long peace, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, one-China policy, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, UNCLOS, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

In my own lengthy conversations with Liu, he traced the source of this confidence back to the Wall Street–initiated global financial crisis of 2008.31 Without boasting, he reviews the record of Chinese performance in response to this challenge. Alone among the world’s largest economies, China managed to weather the crisis and subsequent Great Recession without falling into negative growth.32 Because they had rejected the Washington Consensus to liberalize China’s financial markets, when the 2008 crisis struck, China’s leaders had more tools with which to respond—and they used them. Like the Obama administration, Chinese officials in 2009 provided an unprecedented $586 billion fiscal stimulus. As a result, the Chinese can now travel on fast trains between their major cities.

., 238 V-E Day, 201, 282 Venezuela, 62, 69, 94, 96–98, 104, 195–96, 198–99, 222, 272–73 Vichy France, 280 Victoria (queen), 60, 66–67, 304–5 nn56–57 Vienna, 77, 82, 251, 275 Vietnam, 127, 153, 162, 173, 203, 235, 283 Vietnam War, 130, 148, 161, 213, 225–26 Viscount Esher, 206 W Wallenstein, Albrecht von, 253 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 257 Wang Qishan, 120 war art of, 149–50, 152–53 avoidance of, ix, 58, 68, 85, 187–233, 235, 339 n2 causation and, xiv, 47, 57, 301 n7 Germany and, 63–64 preventive, 82, 268, 275, 311 n122, 333 n49 proxy, 203, 282–83 between Prussia and France, 49–51 between the US and China, xvii, 154–84, 327 n1 See also specific wars War of 1812, 91, 195 War of Austrian Succession, 257, 259 War of Castilian Succession, 246–47, 331 n8, 339 n2 War of Spanish Succession, 257, 259 Warsaw Pact, 201 wars of Suleiman the Magnificent, 250 Washington, George, 145 Washington Consensus, 118 Washington Morning Post, 104 Washington Naval Treaty, 198 Waterloo, 263 Wawro, Geoffrey, 267 weapons, 163–65, 172, 175, 180–81, 184, 202, 227, 229 See also cyberspace; nuclear weapons Weinberg, Albert, 93 weiqi, 152 See also go Wenzhou, 124 West Berlin, 226 Westwood, J.


pages: 496 words: 131,938

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Only at the end of the Cold War could the West be confident in the triumph of its liberal, democratic, capitalist system. And only in the 1990s did the world order become truly global as numerous former Soviet republics joined the European Union and NATO, while dozens of developing countries joined bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) that promoted what was known as the “Washington Consensus” of free trade and economic deregulation. Western laws, interventions, money, and culture set the global agenda. But the nearly two decades spanning the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the 2003 Iraq War through the 2007–08 financial crisis to the November 2016 election of Donald Trump as US president will be remembered as a period of profound rupture with the previous decades of Western dominance.

., 287 Rosen, Dan, 156 Rudd, Kevin, 12 rule of law, 281, 282, 292, 312 blurred line between abuse of power and, 319 economic performance and, 309–10 Rumi, 39, 220 Rushdie, Salman, 256 Russia, modern, 3, 11, 15, 40, 140 arms exports of, 86, 87 Asian territory of, 82 China and, 19–20, 82–83, 84–85 Crimea annexed by, 83 ethnic and cultural diversity of, 89 Europe and, 83–84, 85, 89 European territory of, 82 expansionism of, 240 grain exports of, 90 India and, 86–87 Iran and, 87 Israel and, 88 Japan and, 82, 86–87 Latin American investments of, 275 North Korea and, 143 oil and gas exports of, 82–83, 84, 87–88, 175, 176 Qatar and, 88 re-Asianization of, 81–91 Saudi Arabia and, 87–88 Southeast Asia and, 87 Southwest Asia and, 87 stability preferred over democratic ideals in, 310 Syria and, 11, 83, 87, 88 Turkey and, 88, 92–93 2016 US election and, 83, 320 Ukraine invaded by, 83 Western sanctions against, 83, 86, 240–41 West’s divided policies toward, 83–84 see also Soviet Union Russia, prerevolutionary: Bolshevik Revolution in, 49 in era of European imperialism, 45, 47, 48 Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), 88 Rwanda, 268 Ryukyu Kingdom, 44 Safavid Empire, 106 Saint Petersburg, 82, 90 Salesforce, 331 Salman, king of Saudi Arabia, 103 Salopek, Paul, 4–5 Samarkand, 32 Samsung, 159, 195, 211 Sanskrit, 69, 253 Sassanian Empire, 36 Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie), 256 Saudi Arabia, 11, 50, 54, 57, 71–72, 101, 134, 251 alternative energy programs in, 179 Asia investments by, 104 bond offerings by, 165 Chinese arms sales to, 101 economic diversification in, 190 Indian migrants in, 334 Iran and, 95–96, 100, 105–6 oil exports of, 58, 87–88, 102, 103 privatization in, 170 Public Investment Fund (PIF) of, 164 Russia and, 87–88 technocracy in, 312 Saudi Aramco, 102, 103, 104, 168 Saudi-Iraqi Coordination Council, 96 Schmidt, Eric, 200 Schröder, Gerhard, 83 sciences: Asian achievements in, 354–55 Asian fusion of spirituality with, 355 Scythians, 29, 30, 76 SEA Group, 167, 189, 209 sea levels, rising, 181–82 security systems, in Asia, 137–44 self-determination, 22 Seljuks, 38, 39, 44, 76 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 3, 62, 113, 220, 231 service sector growth, 191, 192 sexual discrimination, sexual harassment, 314–15 shadow economies, 203 Shah Jahan, 41 shale oil energy revolution, 13, 175, 272 Shanghai, 42, 114 art scene in, 342 Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), 60, 84, 86, 92, 106, 108, 117 Shanghai-Tehran railway, 106 Shankar, Ravi, 332 Sharp, 132 Shi’a Muslims, 36, 41, 58, 95, 106, 312 Shintoism, 31, 34, 69 Shōtoku, prince of Japan, 35 Siam, 45–46 Siberia, 82 Siddiqi, Lutfey, 163 Siemens, 242, 246 Sikhs, 47 Sikkim, 186 Silicon Valley, 172, 199, 219, 287 Silk Road Fund, 110 Silk Roads, 24, 32, 33, 35, 40, 68, 69, 76, 81, 106, 239, 329 modern versions of, 1, 75, 84, 92, 97, 103, 108–13, 122, 244, 246, 252 as weakened by European voyages of discovery, 44 Silk Way Rally, 81 Simpfendorfer, Ben, 96–97 Sina Weibo, 314 Singapore, 22, 46, 53, 56, 74, 121, 156, 187, 212, 268, 334 American expats in, 234 art scene in, 342 civil liberties in, 297 civil service in, 292–93 in Cold War era, 54 data collection in, 295–96 democracy in, 288–89, 290 diversified economy of, 290 education in, 294 ethnic and cultural diversity of, 288, 297–98, 337 gun and drug laws of, 306 Japan and, 50–51, 133 Latin America investments of, 277 as libertarian nanny state, 289 as melting pot, 24 as model for other Asian countries, 299, 331 multiracial families in, 337–38 parliamentary system of, 295 policy corrections in, 291 public trust in government in, 291 technocratic government of, 287–99 technological innovation in, 195 Singapore Cooperation Program, 299 Singh, Shailendra, 174 Sino-Australian Free Trade Industrial Park, 129 Sino Israel Technology Innovation fund, 99 Sistema, 90 Slovakia, 256 Slumdog Millionaire (film), 348 social media, 208–9, 314 censorship of, 320 SoftBank, 112, 134, 171, 174, 179, 193 Sogdian peoples, 32, 33, 67 solar panel industry, 242, 272–73 Song Dynasty, 38–39, 42, 73 South Asia: early history of, 35 economic growth of, 9 failure of democracy in, 302 low-level workers from, 334–35 Muslims in, 70–71 oil and gas imports of, 152 poverty in, 183, 184 religious and ethnic diversity in, 70 South China Sea, 60, 84, 125, 130 Chinese assertiveness in, 19, 60, 84, 123, 124, 128, 137 Southeast Asia, 29, 50, 52, 208 Africa and, 264 Asianization of, 81 China and, 122, 154 Chinese migration in, 333 in Cold War era, 52, 53–54 cross-border integration of, 121–27 digital integration in, 187–89 economic growth in, 63, 148 energy investments of, 102 European colonization of, 45–46, 67 failures of democracy in, 302–3 foreign investment in, 9, 121, 148, 154, 250 Gulf states trade with, 102 India and, 154–55 Indianization of, 34 Indian migrants in, 334 internal trade in, 152 Japan and, 50–51, 133, 153–54, 156 low-level workers from, 334–35 manufacturing in, 133, 148, 153–54 Muslims in, 38–39, 43, 70–71, 121 1997 financial crisis in, 121 opium products in, 123 in post–Cold War era, 61 religious and ethnic diversity of, 43, 46, 70, 121 Russia and, 87 South Korea and, 153–54 tourism in, 122 US and, 125 see also Association of Southeast Asian Nations Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), 53 South Korea, 14, 16, 55, 56, 60, 61, 63, 104, 275 Asian migrants in, 336–37 automation in, 193 capitalism in, 159 cashless economy in, 189 China and, 141–42 civil society in, 313 corruption in, 161 economic growth of, 158 film industry in, 348 global branding of, 331 Gulf states and, 102 Japan and, 141–42 multiethnic families in, 336 North Korea and, 142 Southeast Asia and, 153–54 technological innovation in, 195, 197 US and, 52, 142–43 Vietnam and, 154 Southwest Asia, 54 in Cold War era, 54 Russia and, 87 use of term, 6 sovereign debt, 165–66 Soviet Union, 49, 300 Afghanistan invaded by, 58, 59 Africa and, 261 in clashes with China, 56 in Cold War, see Cold War collapse of, 13, 14, 58, 59, 82, 283 Germany’s invasion of, 50 Spain, transpacific trade of, 44, 74 Spanish-American War, 2, 48 Sri Lanka, 105, 334 Srivijaya Kingdom, 34, 35, 38, 39, 70 State Department, US, Asia and, 143–44 steel production, 109, 176, 272–73 Steinmeier, Frank-Walter, 12 stock markets, Asia, 167–68 Straits Times, 290 Suez Canal, 102 Suez Canal Economic Zone, 99 Suharto, 61 Sui Dynasty, 37 Sukarno, 53 Sumatra, 38, 45, 70 Sumer, 28, 29 Sunni Muslims, 11, 36, 38, 57, 95, 312 Sun Tzu, 31 Sun Yat-sen, 48, 49 Sweden, Syrian refugees in, 255–56 Sykes-Picot Agreement, 49 Syngman Rhee, 55 Syria, 11, 16, 49, 54, 62, 94 civil war in, 63, 95, 255 Iran and, 106 Russia and, 11, 83, 87, 88 Syrian refugees, 218 systems, global, 7 systems, regional: Asia as, 5, 6–7, 15 conflict and, 11 Europe as, 7 North America as, 7 in world order, 13–14 Tagore, Rabindranath, 48, 351, 353 Taipei, art scene in, 342 Taiping Rebellion, 47 Taiwan, 52, 56, 61 China and, 141 civil society in, 313 Tajikistan, 59, 108–9, 182 Talas, Battle of, 36, 37, 77, 117 Tale of Genji, The (Murasaki), 353 Taliban, 62, 68, 116–17, 139 Tan, Anthony, 175 Tan, Yinglan, 173 Tang Dynasty, 36–38, 69, 70, 72, 75, 117, 137 Taoism, 182 Tao of Physics, The (Capra), 220 Tarim basin, 32, 33, 35, 36, 59 Tatars, 89 technocratic governance systems, 286–313 civil service in, 292–93 data collection and, 295–96 policy corrections in, 291 utilitarianism and, 286, 298, 306 technological innovation, 195, 196–200 Teets, Jessica, 300–301 Tehran-Mashhad railway, 107 Tel Aviv, 98 telemedicine, 202 television, American, Asians in, 350 Tencent, 104, 167–68, 188, 189, 193, 198, 199, 200, 209, 314, 318, 319 Tenshin, Okakura, 351 terrorism, 62–63, 97, 113, 116–17, 139, 220, 231, 240 Tesla, 179 Tetlock, Philip, 291 Thailand, 61, 63, 89, 121, 122–23, 154 Asian foreign labor in, 335 in Cold War era, 53, 54 corruption in, 161 economic growth of, 148 eco-tourism in, 340 failure of democracy in, 302 foreign investment in, 192–93 manufacturing in, 192–93 military junta in, 307 privatization in, 170 technocracy in, 308 Thomas, Apostle, 36 3D printing, 213 Tibet, 34, 36, 38, 47, 52, 55, 120 Time, 288 Timur (Tamerlane), 41 Timurid Dynasty, 41, 42 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 291 Tokyo, 47, 342 top-down revolutions, 309–13 tourism: in Asia, 213–14 Asian, in US and Europe vs. within Asia, 339–40 eco-, 340 Toynbee, Arnold, 22 trade: Asia-Europe axis of, 13, 14 internal, 150–52, 156–57, 212 intraregional, 62 see also free trade; specific countries and subregions Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), 355 Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline, 94 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 126, 140, 141, 272, 273 transportation innovation, 198 Treasury bonds, US, Asian holdings of, 163, 164 Treasury Department, US, 157 Trenin, Dmitri, 83, 90 Trudeau, Justin, 223 Truman, Harry, 52, 287 Trump, Donald, 213, 232 anti-Asian policies of, 10, 152, 194, 195, 224, 225 anti-Hispanic policies of, 272 climate change and, 178 election of, 3, 16, 272, 273, 283, 294, 384 Europe and, 240 Gulf states and, 101 Indian Americans’ support for, 222 Israel and, 98 North Korea and, 142 Pakistan and, 114 populism of, 18, 284 Russia and, 84 Taiwan and, 141 unpredictability of, 18 US State Department gutted by, 143–44 Tsinghua University, 232 Tsushima, Battle of, 48 Turkestan, 47, 117 Turkestan Empire, 41–42 Turkey, Republic of, 3, 49, 58, 101 Asian investment in, 93–94 Asianization of, 81 China and, 93 European focus of, 57, 60, 91–92 European immigrants from, 253, 256 Iran and, 94 Muslims in, 92 oligarchic regime in, 311 re-Asianization of, 91–94 Russia and, 88, 92–93 Syrian refugees in, 63, 94, 95 Turkic peoples, 38, 39, 67, 68, 91 Turkmenistan, 59, 92, 106, 108, 140 Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) natural gas pipeline, 118 Turnbull, Malcolm, 129 Uber, 174–75, 198 Uighur people, 37, 42, 117 Ukraine, 83, 85, 241 Umayyad Caliphate, 36 Understanding Latin America (Toro Hardy), 275 UN Human Rights Council, 324 Uniqlo, 345 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 88, 96, 100, 101, 104, 312 alternative energy programs in, 179 bond offerings by, 165 digital technology in, 318–19 Indian migrants in, 334 oil exports of, 102, 103 technocracy in, 312 United Kingdom, see Great Britain United Nations, 51 United States: Afghanistan invaded by, 62 AI research in, 199–200 Arab world and, 100–101 arms sales of, 16–17, 101 Asian belief systems in, 220 Asian capital in, 163 Asian companies in, 227–28 Asian economic growth as benefit to, 207 Asian goal of reduced dependence on, 17 Asian immigration to, see Asian Americans Asian investments in, 164 Asian investments of, 110–11, 207 Asian military presence of, 137, 138 Asian trade deficits of, 16 Asian trade with, 144 Asian views of, 16–17 Australia and, 128 Chinese acquisition of technology companies blocked by, 195–96 Chinese trade with, 272–73 civil service in, 293 coal exports of, 177 in Cold War, see Cold War East Asia and, 140–41 eroding industrial base of, 16 ethnic diversity in, 221–22 European capital in, 164–65 Europe’s relations with, 240 failed West Asian policies of, 140 failures of democracy in, 282–85, 294 falling standard of living in, 284–85 global civilization as influenced by, 21, 22–23 global governance and, 321 income inequality in, 228, 285 Iraq invaded by, 62 Japan and, 136 Latin America and, 271–72 Muslims in, 220 in North American regional system, 7 North Korea and, 142–43 oil and gas exports of, 16, 207 outsourcing of jobs by, 16 Pakistan and, 113–14 Philippines and, 123–24 populism in, 283–84 PPP of, 10 protectionist policies of, 241 retail sector in, 228 Russian sanctions by, 240–41 shale oil revolution in, 13, 175, 272 Southeast Asia and, 125 South Korea and, 142–43 South Pacific tensions of, 48 South Pacific territories of, 48 as superpower, 2, 14, 15, 22 Syrian refugees in, 218 technocracy in, 287 utilitarian thinking as lacking in, 299 Vietnam and, 125 Ur, 28 Ural Mountains, 81, 82 urban development, 156, 190, 245–46 utilitarianism, 286, 298, 306, 320 Uzbekistan, 59, 72, 108, 169, 226–27 Chinese hegemony resisted by, 20 civil society in, 313 economic growth of, 17, 109 Vedas, 29 Venezuela, 271, 274 China and, 274–75 venture capital (VC) industry, in Asia, 173–74 Vienna, 40 Vietnam, 45, 52, 60, 121, 161, 274, 275 China and, 124–25 in Cold War era, 56 early history of, 31–32, 38 economic growth in, 308 industrialization in, 63 South Korea and, 154 territorial claims of, 11 US and, 125 Vietnamese Americans, 217 Vietnam War, 52, 56 Vitasoy, 172 Vivekananda, Swami, 220 Vladivostok, 90 Wadhwa, Vivek, 219 Wahhabism, 72, 114 Walmart, 193, 208 warfare: in Asia, 75–76 in Europe, 75 war on terror, 113, 115, 240 Washington Consensus, 2–3 Water Margin, 353 water shortages, 181 wealth management industry, 160–61 Weber, Max, 293 WeChat, 314 Wei Fenghe, 84 West: arms sales to Asia by, 212 Asia studies in, 352 China-centric views of, 18–19 as dependent on Asian economic growth, 206–14 economic and social ills of, 3 ignorance about Asia in, 17–20, 24, 76, 329 outsourcing of manufacturing to Asia by, 62 uncritical self-appraisal of, 351–52 worldview of, 10–11 West Asia, 57, 69–70, 72 Asianization of, 9, 81 civil society in, 313 conflict and state failure in, 95 crusades and, 39 dawn of civilization in, 28 ethnic and sectarian violence in, 256 India and, 155 oil and gas exports of, 9, 23, 57, 62, 152 in post–Cold War era, 58 re-Asianization of, 95–106 refugees from, 95 terrorism in, 62–63 use of term, 6 US involvement in, 59, 140 Western Educated Industrial Rich Democracies (WEIRD), 357 What Is Global History?


Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial intermediation, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mirror neurons, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Veblen good, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working poor, zero-sum game

It did not codify the idea of rational economic man, which had originated more than a century earlier and was of far wider application within economics. And it was only indirectly related to the factors—communications, technology, development and specifically the opening up of India and China and other new markets under the free-market ‘Washington Consensus’—which drove the globalization of trade over the same period. The critique of ‘neoliberalism’ had real force in places, but in its desire for a sweeping and condemnatory overall narrative it mistook much of what was really going on. It reinforced the caricatures, rather than dispelling them.

See America universal opulence, 185, 271–272, 315 unproductive labour, 111 urbanization, of Scotland, 91 utility diminishing marginal, 201–202 maximizing, 194, 196, 201, 212, 222 principle of, 198 value, 105, 175, 305 of commerce, 235–236 economics and, 162–163 in human interaction, 329 moral, 296–297 norms and, 230 public, private, 242–243 in trade, 107 Veblen goods, 247–248 Vindication of the Rights of Women (Wollstonecraft), 220 Viner, Jacob, xii virtue, 56–57 Volkswagen, 284 Voltaire, 84, 289–290 wage inequality, 261–262 Walpole, Horace, 82 Walpole, Robert, 18, 100, 278 Walras, Léon, 201–203 war, specialization and, 119 Washington Consensus, 245 Watt, James, 175 wealth, 104, 107–108, 110, 172 The Wealth of Nations (Smith, A.), xii, 9–10, 14, 44, 53, 168 American Revolutionary War and, 104 on Ayr Bank collapse, 100 Bagehot on, 277 on behaviours, 221 on capital, money, 91–92 changes to, 145 on commerce, capital accumulation, 181–182 on commercial society, 316 on division of labour, 177 Dundas on, 135 on East India Company, 139–141 on economic progress, 112 on England, France, 291 equilibrium theory and, 195 Fox on, 134 on free markets, 184–185 on government, 187 on history, 190 on Hume, 176 influence of, 161 against injustice, 191 intellectual foundations of, 27 on the invisible hand, 171–173 on labour market, 187–188 Lectures on Jurisprudence and, 79–80, 85–86, 179 mainstream economics and, 211, 213 Mandeville and, 56 on markets, 229, 241, 253 Mill on, 200 on Oxford, 23 on political economy, 104, 119, 192 on public finance, 117 on public policy, 111–112 reception of, 161–162 on regulation, 188–189 research for, 88 reviews of, 123–125, 138–139 Schumpeter on, 175 on self-interest, 176–177, 183 on slavery, 232 Stewart on, 179 structure of, 104–105 The Theory of Moral Sentiments and, 160–161, 166–167, 178–180, 237–238 third edition of, 137, 140–141 on trade, 279 transcription of, 94 on universal opulence, 185 on women, 219 wealth-creation, 275, 321 Wedderburn, Alexander, 128–129, 134–135 Whigs, 32, 40 Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?


pages: 483 words: 134,377

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly

air freight, Andrei Shleifer, battle of ideas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, germ theory of disease, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, M-Pesa, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, oil shock, place-making, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional

Country Growth Performance and Temporary Shocks,” Journal of Monetary Economics 32, no. 3 (1993): 459–83. 3. Ricardo Hausmann, Lant Pritchett, and Dani Rodrik, “Growth Accelerations” Journal of Economic Growth 10, no. 4 (December 2005): 303–29; available at: http://www.nber.org/papers/w10566.pdf, accessed August 27, 2013. 4. Dani Rodrik, “Goodbye Washington Consensus, Hello Washington Confusion?” Journal of Economic Literature 44 (December 2006): 969–83. 5. Alwyn Young, “The African Growth Miracle,” Journal of Political Economy 120, no. 4 (August 2012): 696–739. 6. Alan Heston, Robert Summers, and Bettina Aten, “Penn World Table Version 7.1,” Center for International Comparisons of Production, Income and Prices at the University of Pennsylvania, November 2012. 7.

Dani Rodrik, “Institutions for High-Quality Growth: What They Are and How to Acquire Them,” Studies in Comparative International Development 35, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 3–31. 6. William Easterly, “Benevolent Autocrats,” DRI Working Paper Number 75, Development Research Institute, New York University, New York, NY, 2011. 7. Nancy Birdsall and Francis Fukuyama, “The Post-Washington Consensus: Development After the Crisis,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 2 (March/April 2011): 51. Available at: http://iis-db.stanford.edu/pubs/23124/foreignaffairs_postwashingtonconsensus.pdf, accessed August 31, 2013. 8. Thomas L. Friedman, “Our One-Party Democracy,” New York Times (September 8, 2009).


pages: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

The conceptions of the market that underlay that analysis mischaracterized it: the standard analyses underestimated the strength-and weaknessesof market economies." 26 In 1995, Stiglitz joined the President's Council of Economic Advisers and in 1997 was appointed chief economist at the World Bank. Installed at the heart of the Washington consensus, Stiglitz did not change his views-nor refrain from expressing them. He Culture and Prosperity { 207} found a sympathetic listener in the World Bank's president, James Wolfensohn, who had sought to broaden the institution's remit. But Stiglitz's outspoken views went too far for Wall Street.

The American Business Model And so at the start of the twenty-first century, the American business model (ABM) plays the role in political economy that socialism enjoyed for so long. All political positions, even hostile ones, are defined by their relationship to it. Globalization and privatization have displaced capital and class as the terms of discourse. The label market forces immediately evokes hostile or supportive reactions. The term Washington consensus is for some a statement of inescapable reali- Culture and Prosperity { 313} ties of economic life; it is demonized in many poor states as an attack on democracy and living standards. The right has determined the terms of political debate. The philosophy of the ABM, as articulated by Milton Friedman, is of government as referee.


Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration by Kent E. Calder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, air freight, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, geopolitical risk, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interest rate swap, intermodal, Internet of things, invention of movable type, inventory management, John Markoff, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart grid, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, zero-sum game

The principal policy lender globally has since the early post–World War II years been the World Bank, and the main regional lender since the mid-1960s has been the ADB— both dominated by the United States and secondarily by Japan. There have The Logic of Integration 95 been attempts, such as the 1991 Northeast Asian Development Bank proposal of former Korean prime minister Nam Duck Woo, informally backed for years by the Korean government, to supplement this “Washington Consensus” structure.71 Yet these revisionist proposals for many years invariably failed due to quiet opposition— or at least lack of enthusiasm—from traditionally dominant institutions, who pointed to potential dangers of moral hazard. It is in this connection that the proposals by China (the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, AIIB) and the BRICS countries (the New Development Bank, NDB) are so interesting.

See also Logistics Revolution UK Independence Party, 201 Ukraine, and WMD transfer, 196 Ukraine crisis (2013 –2014): as critical juncture, 65 – 68; impact on EU-Russian relations, 171–172; impact on Sino-Russian relations, 84, 153 –159; US response to, 244 Unemployment, 189, 191, 201, 212, 220, 237, 293n5, 302n38 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 78, 82, 112, 217, 222 United Nations (UN): at Belt and Road Forum, 46; as having proved ineffective in handling global conflict, 223; as principal security pillar of original postwar system, 208; Security Council, 209, 239 United States: and China, 5, 12, 96, 104, 108, 114, 117, 118, 128, 143, 145, 148, 157, 226 –227; conversion of into Super Continent, xiii–xvi; economic and political power in global perspective, 1–4, 7– 8, 160 –161; energy, 78, 81, 83, 98, 119, 143; Global Financial Crisis, 61– 64; and international economic and political order, 202 –204, 206 –209, 210 –211, 219 –223, 233 –234; response to Eurasian integration, 240 –251; response to Ukraine crisis, 67– 68 United States International Development Finance Corporation (USIDFC), 250 Urumqi, 14m, 144m, 194 –195; and Eurasian connectivity, 59 Urumqi Trade Fair, 58 US–Mexico–Canada (USMCA) agreement, 241 Uyghur people, 148, 188, 192, 194, 195, 296n46 Uzbekistan, 17, 36, 61, 147, 192, 197, 244 Value-added taxes (VAT), 105 Vernon, Raymond, 210 Vestas (Danish company), 84 Vietnam: and China (trade), 130; and China (security), 127, 128, 129, 186; and Europe, 57; and Russia, 152, 156, 157; SingaporeKunming Rail Link (SKRL), 130 –133 Vietnam War, 2, 85, 136, 216 Visegrad countries, 54, 56, 92, 170, 172, 174m, 175, 178, 179, 270n59 Vladivostok Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation, 33, 152 Vogel, Ezra F., 262n2, 285n46 Voltaire, 162, 163, 164 Volvo, 175 Vostok 2018 military exercise, 158 Wang Gungwu, 225 Warsaw Pact, 13, 56, 57, 122, 165, 167, 172, 210 Washington (as government). See United States Washington Consensus, 95 Water security challenges, 197 Weapons of mass destruction (WMD), 195 –197, 196t Wen Jiabao, 95, 116 White, Harry Dexter, 207 Wilson, Harold, 220 Witte, Sergius, 32, 48 World Bank, 46, 94, 207, 208, 209 –210, 230 World Economic Forum in Davos, 114, 230, 236 World Health Organization (WHO), 199 World Trade Organization (WTO), 46, 118, 168, 208, 212, 224, 299n2 Xi Jinping: and Belt and Road Forum, 97, 117, 236; and Belt and Road Initiative, 4, 11, 32, 44, 46, 48, 96, 107, 108, 115, 116, 121, 203, 226, 230, 234; and Boao Forum for Asia, 236; as Chinese leader, 43, 251; and G-2, 239 –240; Eurasian diplomacy, 137, 139; and Europe, 68, 178, 204, 219; and Russia, 32, 41, 84, 101, 151–154, 204, 219; and Southeast Asia, 116, 135, 204; and Xi Zhongxun, 102 Xinjiang, 110, 112, 141, 142, 148, 189, 192, 194, 195 Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (Bingtuan), 110 Xiongnu, 25 –26, 257–258n9 Index Yakutia, 34, 144 Yamal LNG project, 147, 284n33 Yanukovych, Viktor, 66 – 67, 153, 171, 286n63 Yan Xuetong, 225 Yaowarat: and Bangkok Chinese, 124 Yeltsin, Boris, 55, 56, 60, 151 Yergin, Daniel, 210 Yiwu: and London rail service, 181 Yuan dynasty, 28, 161 325 Yukos, 142, 283n15 Yunnan, 115, 127, 130, 134, 135, 139 Zakaria, Fareed, 191 Zeng Peiyan, 95 Zhang Qian, and classic Silk Roads, 24, 25, 26, 28, 47, 257n3 Zheng He, 30, 44, 123 Zhou Enlai, 51, 101 Zhu Rongji, 187


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

In many cases (though not China’s), the conditions attached to loans from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank were a major factor, so was the economic orthodoxy imparted to elite students at schools like Harvard and the University of Chicago. All of these and other factors played a role in shaping what was (never ironically) referred to as the Washington Consensus. Underneath it all is the constant drive for endless economic growth, a drive that, as will be explored later on, goes much deeper than the trade history of the past few decades. But there is no question that the trade architecture and the economic ideology embedded within it played a central role in sending emissions into hyperdrive.

Center for Economic and Policy Research, September 2012, p. 26; “Ecuador Overview,” Ecuador, World Bank, http://www.worldbank.org; “Population Below National Poverty Line, Urban, Percentage,” Millienium Development Goals Database, U.N. Data, http://data.un.org. 42. “Bolivia: Staff Report for the 2013 Article IV Consultation,” International Monetary Fund, February 2014, p. 6. 43. Luis Hernández Navarro, “Bolivia Has Transformed Itself by Ignoring the Washington Consensus,” Guardian, March 21, 2012. 44. ECUADOR: Nick Miroff, “In Ecuador, Oil Boom Creates Tensions,” Washington Post, February 16, 2014; BOLIVIA AND VENEZUELA: Dan Luhnow and José de Córdoba, “Bolivia Seizes Natural-Gas Fields in a Show of Energy Nationalism,” Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2006; ARGENTINA: “Argentine Province Suspends Open-Pit Gold Mining Project Following Protests,” MercoPress, January 31, 2012; “GREEN DESERTS”: “The Green Desert,” The Economist, August 6, 2004; BRAZIL: “The Rights and Wrongs of Belo Monte,” The Economist, May 4, 2013; RAW RESOURCES: Exports of Primary Products as Percentage of Total Exports, “Statistical Yearbook for Latin America and the Caribbean,” Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, United Nations, 2012, p. 101; CHINA: Joshua Schneyer and Nicolás Medina Mora Pérez, “Special Report: How China Took Control of an OPEC Country’s Oil,” Reuters, November 26, 2013. 45.

., 75 venture capitalists, 252 Vermont: anti-fracking movement in, 348 local agriculture in, 404–5 Vernon, Caitlyn, 365 victory gardens, 16, 17 Vidal, John, 244 Vietnam War, 261 Virgin Earth Challenge, 257, 284–85 Virgin Green Fund, 238, 239, 253 Virgin Group, 230, 237 Virgin Airlines, 231, 238, 241–44, 249–52 Virgin Fuels, 238 Virgin Racing, 243 Virgin Trains, 231, 238, 252–53 Viteri, Franco, 388 volcanic eruptions: droughts and, 272–73 global impact of, 274 weather patterns and, 259, 270, 271–74 Volney, Constantin-François, 273 Vonnegut, Kurt, 286, 287 Vowel, Chelsea, 371 Voynet, Dominique, 218 wage controls, 125 Wallach, Lori, 359–60 Wall Street, 206, 208 in financial crisis of 2008, 9, 44 Wall Street Journal, 207, 312 Walmart, 196, 208–10 Walton, Sam, 209 Walton, Sam Rawlings, 209 Walton Family Foundation, 209 Wang Wenlin, 300 Wania, Frank, 328n Ward, Barbara, 286 Warsaw climate change summit (2013), 200–201, 276 Washington, D.C.: Keystone XL protest in, 139, 301–2 record temperatures in, 73 Washington Consensus, 81 Washington State, 319 Indigenous land rights in, 323, 374–75, 380–81 proposed coal export terminals in, 320, 322, 346, 349, 374, 380–81 Washington, Tracie, 419 water: disruption to supplies of, 14, 165 First Nations and, 384 privatization of, 133 as public utility, 7 water pollution: extractive industry and, 83, 94, 295, 296, 332, 344–47 from fracking, 328–29, 332, 344, 346 water power, 16, 101, 215 of factories, 171 steam engine vs., 171–72 Waters, Donny, 431, 432 Watt, James, 171–75, 204, 266, 394, 410 Waxman-Markey, 227 wealth: concentration of, 154, 155 decentralization of, 131 greenhouse gas emissions and, 113–14 inequality of, 123, 454–55 redistribution of, 40, 42, 453 transfers of, 5 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 173, 462 weapons, climate change and, 9 weather, extreme, 35, 102–10 weather futures, 8–9 weatherization, 93 weather patterns: global warming and, 269 historical record of, 271–76 Pinatubo eruption and, 259, 270, 271–72, 274 variations in, 269 weather patterns, intentional modification of: as weapon, 261, 278 see also Pinatubo Option; Solar Radiation Management Weintrobe, Sally, 12 Werner, Brad, 449–50, 451, 460 West Antarctic ice sheet, 13, 14, 15 West Burton, England, 300 Western Australia, 376 West, Thomas, 365 West Virginia, 332, 357n, 367 wetlands, extractive industry damage to, 425–26 Weyerhaeuser, 369 Where Do We Go from Here (King), 453 Whitehead, Andrew, 432 Whitehorn, Will, 230–31 Whitehouse, Mark, 428 Whiteman, Phillip, Jr., 386 Whole Earth Catalogue, 288 WikiLeaks, 78, 165 wilderness system, federal, 203 wildfires, 14, 52, 108, 446 Wildlife Conservation Society, 221–22 Wildlife Society, 192 Willemse, Oom Johannes, 347 Willett Advisors, 216, 235 Williams, Eric, 415 Willis, Rebecca, 90 wind farms, 110, 223, 287 “Window for Thermal Coal Investment Is Closing” (Goldman Sachs), 352 wind power, 16, 67, 70, 97, 102, 118, 122, 124, 127, 131–32, 147, 215, 237 in combined-cycle plant, 129 fracking’s negative impact on, 129, 144n large offshore, 131 manufacturers in, 68 private sector and, 100–101 Wood, Lowell, 268n, 271, 280, 288 Woolsey, R.


Masters of Mankind by Noam Chomsky

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, failed state, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land bank, land reform, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, nuremberg principles, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

Or to discuss the suffering caused across the board by “downsizing” when the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the category of “executives, managers, and administrative personnel” for US companies grew almost 30 percent from 1983 to 1993,53 while compensation for executives skyrocketed (and easily retains its international lead, relative to labor costs)—apparently with little or no correlation to performance.54 Similarly, some caution seems necessary in lauding the marvels of the “emerging markets” when the leading recipient of US Foreign Direct Investment in the hemisphere (Canada aside) is Bermuda, with about one-quarter, another 20 percent going to other tax havens, much of the rest to such “economic miracles” as Mexico, which followed the dictates of the “Washington consensus” with unusual obedience, and less than glorious consequences for the overwhelming majority.55 In fact, the very notions of “capitalism” and “markets” seem to be disappearing from consciousness, much like the concept of democracy. A few examples may serve to illustrate. A lead story in the Wall Street Journal, discussing the “fateful choices” that states are making to attract business, compares two cases: Maryland, with its “antibusiness image,” and “more Republican” Virginia, which is “more gung-ho about corporate growth” and more sympathetic to “the choices made by entrepreneurs.”


The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community by David C. Korten

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, banks create money, big-box store, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, death of newspapers, declining real wages, different worldview, digital divide, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, peak oil, planetary scale, plutocrats, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, shared worldview, social intelligence, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, trade route, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, World Values Survey

Only the misinformed or mean-spirited who would deny the poor their opportunity for a better life oppose these institutions and their sacred mission. This story is commonly referred to as the Washington consensus, because it is propagated by the U.S. Treasury Department, the World Bank, the IMF, and various related think tanks, lobbyists, and contractors based in Washington, D.C. It is also known as economic liberalism, neoliberalism, and corporate libertarianism. Because advocates of the Washington consensus cling to their story with the blind faith of true believers in denial of all contrary evidence, international financier George Soros calls them “market fundamentalists.”


pages: 790 words: 150,875

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

Nemesis came first in the backstreets of Sadr City and the fields of Helmand, which exposed not only the limits of American military might but also, more importantly, the naivety of neo-conservative visions of a democratic wave in the Greater Middle East. It struck a second time with the escalation of the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 into the credit crunch of 2008 and finally the ‘great recession’ of 2009. After the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the sham verities of the ‘Washington Consensus’ and the ‘Great Moderation’ – the central bankers’ equivalent of the ‘End of History’ – were consigned to oblivion. A second Great Depression for a time seemed terrifyingly possible. What had gone wrong? In a series of articles and lectures beginning in mid-2006 and culminating in the publication of The Ascent of Money in November 2008 – when the financial crisis was at its worst – I argued that all the major components of the international financial system had been disastrously weakened by excessive short-term indebtedness on the balance sheets of banks, grossly mispriced and literally overrated mortgage-backed securities and other structured financial products, excessively lax monetary policy on the part of the Federal Reserve, a politically engineered housing bubble and, finally, the unrestrained selling of bogus insurance policies (known as derivatives), offering fake protection against unknowable uncertainties, as opposed to quantifiable risks.

Once so dominant, the economies of the United States and Europe are now facing the real prospect of being overtaken by China within twenty or even ten years, with Brazil and India not so very far behind. Western ‘hard power’ seems to be struggling in the Greater Middle East, from Iraq to Afghanistan, just as the ‘Washington Consensus’ on free-market economic policy disintegrates. The financial crisis that began in 2007 also seems to indicate a fundamental flaw at the heart of the consumer society, with its emphasis on debt-propelled retail therapy. The Protestant ethic of thrift that once seemed so central to the Western project has all but vanished.


pages: 717 words: 150,288

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", addicted to oil, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, DARPA: Urban Challenge, defense in depth, deindustrialization, digital map, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, edge city, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Food sovereignty, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, illegal immigration, income inequality, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, loose coupling, machine readable, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, pattern recognition, peak oil, planetary scale, post-Fordism, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart transportation, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, white flight, white picket fence

States and consumers alike pile up drastic financial debt, securitized through arcane instruments of global stock markets. By 2006, just before the onset of the global financial crash, financial markets were trading more in a month than the annual gross domestic product of the entire world.9 In practice, the much-vaunted economic axioms of ‘privatization’, ‘structural adjustment’ and the ‘Washington consensus’ camouflage disturbing transformations. They serve as euphemisms for what Gene Ray has called ‘the coordinated coercions of the global debtors’ prison, for the pulverization of local labor and environmental protections, and for the breaking open of all markets to the uncontrolled operations of finance capital’.10 Wealth has been stripped from poor and vulnerable economies through the flagrant predations of global capital, organized from a mere handful of megacities in the North.

See also asymmetric war; Gulf War; Iraq, US war on; just war; Long War; Second World War; securocratic war; urban warfare war crime, 178, 181–82, 275 n.41 Ward, Kevin, 102 n.53 Warden, John, 274–78, 285 Ware Corporation, 189 Warren, Robert, 23, 121, 125 War on Terror, xviii, 9, 20, 27, 31, 38–40, 53, 56–59, 72, 81, 105, 112, 114, 116, 128, 156, 163, 177, 185, 196, 214, 220, 226, 228, 230, 232–34, 237–39, 248, 253, 259–60, 298, 300–301, 306, 315, 318, 322, 338, 350–52, 355, 361, 365, 368, 372, 374 Washington, DC, 103, 128, 268 Washington consensus, 4 Washington Israel Business Council, 253 Washington Post, 214, 364 Watson, Tim, 82, 344 Watts, Michael, 337 n.143 wealth: concentration of, 5–7; and poverty, 5–6 weapons, non-lethal, 244–46 Webb, Dave, 340 n.152 Weber, Cynthia, 374 n.65 Weber, Leanne, 89 n.1, 137 n.177 Weber, Max, Vie City,10 n.33 Weber, Samuel, Targets of Opportunity,89 n.3 Weibel, Peter, 327 n.115, 367 Weitz, Richard, 256 n.110 Weizman, Eyal, xvii n.8, 12 n.43&46, 16 n.65, 21 n.86, 85, 157, 184, 229, 249 n.78, 251, 284 n.76 West Africa, 119, 337 West Bank, 113, 143, 177, 226, 229, 233, 241, 242, 243–44, 246–48, 262, 284–85, 287, 354, 355; simulated, 193 Whitaker, Brian, 53 n.71 Whiteley, Frank, 328 Wielhouwer, Peter, 202 n.57 Wilborn, Paul, 317 n.69 Wilding, Barbara, 259 Williams, Michael, 383 n.94 Willis, Bruce, 69 Wilson, Dean, 89 n.1, 137 n.177 Wilson, J.


pages: 543 words: 147,357

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

They could innovate and grow their balance sheets however they chose, inventing new instruments along the way, and now even the capital they were obliged to hold to sustain confidence could be fudged to meet national rather than international norms. They had been given the wink. A monster was about to be spawned. Turbo finance The implosion of the Communist Bloc and the triumph of liberal capitalist democracy initiated a further intensification of globalisation and the high-water mark of the Washington consensus. However, although the main contours were agreed – rolling back the state, deregulation, balancing budgets, setting inflation targets, privatisation and generally extending the ‘magic of the market’, as Ronald Reagan had famously dubbed it – there was still room for debate. Some economists, such as Jagwad Bhagwati, had impeccable free trade credentials but still had doubts about financial deregulation.

Edward, 266 Stephenson, George, 126, 127 Stiglitz, Joe, 51, 168–9, 367–8, 371 Strategy Unit, 337 structured investment vehicles, 151, 165, 169, 171, 188, 207, 209 Stutzer, Alois, 86 sub-prime mortgages, 64, 161, 203 Sugar, Alan, 64–5, 67 Summers, Larry, 92, 183 the Sun, 318, 327 Sunday Express, 321 Sunday Times, 318 supermarkets, relentless spread of, 389 Sure Start scheme, 10, 278, 307 Sutton Trust, 273, 293 swaps, 164; credit default swaps, 151, 152, 166–8, 170, 171, 175, 176, 191, 203, 207 Switzerland, 7, 86, 138, 180 takeovers and mergers, 8, 21, 33, 92, 245, 250, 258, 259, 388 Taliban, 102 Tax Justice network, 296 taxation: American right’s attitude to, 235, 297; capital transfer taxes, 73–4; collapse of tax base, 224, 368; concessions for private equity, 245, 247, 249, 374; Conservative reforms (1979-97), 275–6; corporation tax, 245; as deterrent to innovation, 104, 105; due desert and, 40, 220, 234, 235, 266; foreign nationals and, 32; housing wealth levy proposal, 373–4; inheritance tax, 73–4, 75, 78, 302–4, 393; low rates of, 5, 19, 387; luck and, 73–4, 75, 78, 303; one-off tax on bank bonuses, 26, 179, 249; progressive/redistributive, 78, 79, 80, 303, 387; proposed reforms, 209–10, 372, 373–4; relief on childcare vouchers, 277; tax avoidance, 25, 29, 42, 145, 151, 193, 245, 295–7; tax credits, 142, 277, 278, 336; tax evasion, 42, 145, 295–7; tax havens, 32, 295; tax relief on debt interest, 209–10, 374 teachers, 306, 307, 308 Technology Foresight, 21 Technology Strategy Board, 21 telecommunications, 133–4, 143 Terra Firma (private-equity firm), 28, 178, 247–8 terrorism, 36 Tesco, 246, 295 Tett, Gillian, 195 Thailand, 168 Thaler, Richard, 94–5 Thatcher, Margaret, 32, 81, 135, 144, 275, 290, 334, 388; centralisation of power, 14, 313; Rupert Murdoch and, 318 Thompson (wire service), 331 ‘3i’, 250, 252 Tilly, Charles, 24, 27, 272 The Times, 288, 295, 318, 319, 327, 330, 349 Times Higher Education, 21 Toulmin, Tim, 325, 332 Tourre, Fabrice, 103, 167–8 Toyota, 91, 269 trade unions, 88, 91, 142, 161, 179, 275, 364, 387; decline of, 272, 291–2, 341, 365–6; print and journalism, 320, 332; undue influence of, 31–2, 33, 364 Train to Gain, 306 Transport for London, 336 Treasury, 92, 178, 208, 214, 215, 218, 335, 336, 337, 369 Treasury and Civil Service Committee, 340 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), 175, 176 Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, 24 Turkish oligarchs, 30 Turnbull, Lord, 334 Turner, Lord Adair, 24, 179 Tyler, Tom, 87 UBS, 170, 178 UK Trade and Industry (UKTI), 230–1 Ulpian (Roman jurist), 45 Unipart, 93 United Nations, 68, 332–3, 384 United States: American colonists, 54, 121, 126; annual consumption levels, 375; anti-statism and, 234, 311; banking system, 138, 150–2, 156, 158–9, 160, 162–3, 167–9, 173–6, 181, 191–2, 195–6, 244; big finance’s penetration of the state, 176–8, 183; United States – continued economic conflict with China, 376–7, 378–80, 381, 382, 383; economic history of, 108, 131–4, 300; executive pay in, 67, 101, 172–4; financial crisis/collapse and, 152, 158–9, 181, 192, 358–9, 375; free market policies/theory in, 140, 145, 160, 163, 165, 184, 234–5; Great Depression, 159, 162, 205, 362; ‘growth triangle’ in South Carolina, 254; impact of small firms, 253, 255, 256; international order and, 226, 378–9, 385–6; LTCM crisis, 169–70, 183, 193, 200–1; money market funds in, 156, 158, 161; neo-conservatism and, 17–18, 144, 297; as non-saver, 36; relationship finance in, 244; savings and loans crisis, 161–2, 163–4; short termism of markets, 241; TARP, 175, 176; ‘tea-party’ conservatism, 234, 327, 386; universal male suffrage, 128; universities, 101, 262–3, 264, 308; volatility of economy, 297; welfare and, 80, 281, 283, 297 universities, 21, 252, 261–5, 295, 308, 355, 370, 372; private schools and, 293–4, 306; uncapping of fees proposal, 264–5, 371 Vadera, Shriti, 178 Value Added Tax (VAT), 366–7, 370, 372 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 133 Venetian empire, 121 venture capitalists, 241, 244–9, 250 Vishny, Robert, 62, 63 Vodafone, 255 Volcker, Paul, 206 voting system: alternative vote system (AV), 345–6; as delivering right-of-centre bias, 343; first-past-the-post system, 97–8, 217, 312, 313, 341, 343, 347; need for reform of, 97–8, 344–6, 347, 391; proportional representation, 97, 98, 344–6, 347, 391 Wales, devolving of power to, 15 Wall Street Journal, 349 Wallis, John Joseph, 113, 116, 129–30 Walpole, Robert, 125, 166 ‘war on terror’, 17, 144 Wars of the Roses, 124 Washington consensus, 163 Washington Post, 183 Watson, David Pitt, 242 Watson, Thomas, 29 Watt, James, 110, 126 ‘weapons of the weak’, 114–15 Weatherstone, Dennis (CEO of JP Morgan), 191–2 Webster, David, 292 Wedgwood, Josiah, 126–7 Weingast, Barry, 113, 116, 129–30 Welch, Jack, 216 welfare/social provision, 34, 80–2, 83–4, 281, 283–5, 297, 335; see also social security benefits; asset based, 298, 301–3, 304; coalition policy on, 343; undermining of popular support for, 80, 281–2, 283, 297, 302–3; universal services, 34, 79, 277, 281 welfare-to-work programmes, 278 Wenger, Arsène, 352 Westminster, Duke of, 64, 65 White, William, 182, 185 Willetts, David, The Pinch, 372 Williams, Rowan (Archbishop of Canterbury), 4, 26 Wilson, Harold, 312 Wilson, Woodrow, 132–3 Wilson Committee into City (1980), 179 Wilthagen, Tom, 299–301 Winstanley College, Wigan, 294 Winston, Robert, 107 wire agencies, 322, 331 Woessmann, Ludger, 305–6 Work Foundation, 94, 233 World Bank, 164, 182, 226, 383, 384 xenophobia, 16, 36 X-Factor, 282, 314 York University, Neuroimaging Centre (YNiC), 263 Young, Michael, 283–4 Young, Toby, 282 Yu Yongding, 381 Zilibotti, Fabrizio, 115–16 Zinoviev letter, 315


pages: 261 words: 57,595

China's Future by David Shambaugh

Berlin Wall, capital controls, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, high-speed rail, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, market bubble, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent-seeking, secular stagnation, short selling, South China Sea, special drawing rights, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional

Instead, they made the case for abandoning the political reform program, reversing the main elements of it, and instituting tight security and Party controls in its place.24 These bureaucracies also stood to financially benefit from a political tightening-up, as there is Big Money in repression. The internal security budget topped the military budget for the first time in 2011 ($83.5 billion vs. $81.2 billion) and did so for the three subsequent fiscal years. Finally, the global financial crisis imbued the Chinese leadership with a sense of hubris over the decline of the Washington Consensus and seeming vindication of the Beijing Consensus models of development. Taken together, I believe these factors all contributed to Beijing’s political pivot in 2009. Since Xi Jinping came to power at the Eighteenth CCP Congress in November 2012, the reign of the Conservatives has continued.


pages: 187 words: 62,861

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest by Yochai Benkler

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, business process, California gold rush, citizen journalism, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, do well by doing good, East Village, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, informal economy, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, peer-to-peer, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

By the 1980s we were back in full swing toward laissez-faire capitalism; the Reagan and Thatcher governments in the United States and Britain, the rise of the efficiency- and free-trade-focused European Commission in Europe, and the emergence of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as bearers of what came to be known as “the Washington Consensus.” The Invisible Hand seemed to have completely won when even the center-left governments of the United States and the United Kingdom, under Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, busied themselves with dismantling welfare as we know it—replacing government bureaucracies with privatized, market-based alternatives—and deregulating the financial markets that flourished in New York and London.


pages: 258 words: 63,367

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Frank Gehry, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, liberation theology, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, precariat, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, working poor

As international affairs scholar Stephen Zunes points out, in the early 1950s, “at a critical point in the nation’s effort to become more self-sufficient, the U.S. government forced Bolivia to use its scarce capital not for its own development, but to compensate the former mine owners and repay its foreign debts.” The economic policies forced on Bolivia at that time were a precursor of the structural-adjustment programs imposed on the continent thirty years later, under the terms of the neoliberal “Washington consensus,” which has generally had disastrous effects wherever its strictures have been observed. By now, the victims of neoliberal market fundamentalism are coming to include the rich countries, where the curse of financial liberalization has helped to bring about the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.


pages: 219 words: 62,816

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky

affirmative action, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, call centre, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, European colonialism, export processing zone, full employment, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, invisible hand, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, mass incarceration, new economy, open immigration, out of africa, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Internationally, the new consensus is sometimes (not very accurately) called globalization. The philosophy behind it can be seen in the Chicago School of Economics–inspired program implemented in Chile in the 1970s, in the Structural Adjustment Programs (or SAPs) mandated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for the Third World in the 1980s, and in the so-called Washington Consensus prescribed for Latin American and other Third World economies in the 1990s. Though they have different names, these policy approaches all encompass similar basic principles, sometimes also called “neoliberal” because they draw on some aspects of nineteenth-century liberal economic thought (which is very different from what Americans generally think of as “liberal” in the twentieth century).


pages: 219 words: 61,720

American Made: Why Making Things Will Return Us to Greatness by Dan Dimicco

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, California high-speed rail, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, digital divide, driverless car, fear of failure, full employment, Google Glasses, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, manufacturing employment, Neil Armstrong, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

And that’s where, as a leader, your job is to make sure you use all of the resources you have at your disposal when the time is right. You can’t waste your capital on small fights. For years—decades, really—the steel industry ran to Washington for help at the first hint of trouble. But the Washington consensus changed to favor the ideology of free trade, no matter how distorted a version it might be. Our leadership role and our reputation helped sway an administration biased toward free trade to support the steel industry on a massive trade dispute. And it was a big one. Everybody in the world got shook up by it—customers, farms, steel producers, trading companies, you name it.


pages: 247 words: 60,543

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony by David G. W. Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bank run, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, COVID-19, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, Diane Coyle, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global village, Hyman Minsky, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market design, Marshall McLuhan, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, one-China policy, Overton Window, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pingit, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, railway mania, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subscription business, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, Washington Consensus

This plan, set out in the EAC’s Monetary Union Protocol, includes the establishment of an East African Monetary Institute (EAMI), with the intention of turning this into an East African Central Bank somewhere down the line. Transnational digital currency: the hard ECU When she was head of the IMF and a pillar of the Washington Consensus – and therefore, to a first approximation, the woman in charge of money – Christine Lagarde gave a talk at the 2017 Bank of England conference on central banking and fintech. In it, she said that virtual currencies (by which she means digital currencies, in my taxonomy) could actually become more stable than fiat currencies (Lagarde 2017).


pages: 569 words: 165,510

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The driver of the Moscow trolley bus I rode from where I was staying to the Kennedy School’s office had a picture of Margaret Thatcher affixed to his windscreen, presumably as a free-market talisman. Her faint Mona Lisa smile and bouffant blond hair radiated in the weak morning sunlight. The economic ideas of the 1980s had by now hardened into what was called the Washington Consensus, a set of policy recommendations touted by the U.S. Treasury, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank for countries afflicted by economic and financial crises. Representatives of all these institutions descended on Moscow to oversee the implementation of reforms at the invitation of the Yeltsin government.

., USSR, 94–98 private/individual aid and, 340 survey/schoolgirls wanting to be prostitutes, 128 See also Russia V Valdai Discussion Club, 132 Vance, J. D., 354–55 volunteering to create opportunities, 358, 359, 360 Voting Rights Act (U.S./1965), 105 W Wagon Works, Shildon, 31, 347 “Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards” (song), 85 Walmart, 343 Wang, Joe, 208, 229 Washington Consensus, 118 Washington Post, 2, 204 Watson, Marjorie, 88–89 Wear Valley, County Durham, 344, 345 Weber, Alfred, 52 Wellington, Duke of, 57 We’re Still Here (Silva), 155–56 Westerhout, Madeleine, 202 Westover, Tara, 354, 355 “White British,” 163–64, 317 white supremacists, 219, 307, 309 “White teenagers” (UK), 164 Wikipedia page, Hill, 245 Wilkerson, Isabel, 307 Williamson, Gavin, 299 wind power, 216 Winter of Discontent (1978–1979), 39 Witton Castle, 42, 208 Witton Park ironworks, 52–53 Wolosky, Lee, 1, 259, 261 Women’s March (January 2017), 206 Women Who Work (Ivanka Trump), 255 Woodward, Bob/Trump tapes, 219, 226 World Bank, 118, 123, 338, 340, 341 World War II Blitz, 191–92 X Xi Jinping, 220, 221 Y Yeltsin, Boris descriptions, 287 political violence and, 278, 287 presidency/administration, 127, 172, 221, 224, 228 reform programs/ “shock therapy,” 117–20 Yom Kippur War, 20 Yovanovitch, Marie (Masha) background, 240 calls/conspiracy theories about, 239 demonization of public service and, 193 as “Obama holdover,” 239 Parnas/Fruman attacks on, 240–41 Trump firing/threats, 238, 241, 251 as Ukraine ambassador, 238 Yudaeva, Ksenia, 132 Z Zakharova, Maria, 132 Zelensky, Volodymyr, 3, 241, 274, 297 Zinberg, Dorothy academic background, 125–26 appearances/Hill, 126 background, 138 gender wage gap and, 138, 142 Zorkin, Valery, 279 Zurbarán, Francisco de, 348 About the Author © Andrew Harnik / AP Photo Fiona Hill is the Robert Bosch Senior Fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution.


pages: 261 words: 64,977

Pity the Billionaire: The Unexpected Resurgence of the American Right by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, bonus culture, business cycle, carbon tax, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, false flag, financial innovation, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, money market fund, Naomi Klein, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, profit maximization, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, union organizing, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Consider the barest facts: this is the fourth successful conservative uprising to happen in the last half century,* each one more a-puff with populist bluster than the last, each one standing slightly more rightward, and each one helping to compose a more spellbinding chapter in the historical epoch that I call “the Great Backlash,” and that others call the “Age of Reagan” (the historian Sean Wilentz), the “Age of Greed” (the journalist Jeff Madrick), the “Conservative Ascendancy” (the journalist Godfrey Hodgson), or the “Washington Consensus” (various economists). Think about it this way. It has now been more than thirty years since the supply-side revolution conquered Washington, since laissez-faire became the dogma of the nation’s ruling class, shared by large numbers of Democrats as well as Republicans. We have lived through decades of deregulation, deunionization, privatization, and free-trade agreements; the neoliberal ideal has been projected into every corner of the nation’s life.


pages: 583 words: 182,990

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cakes and ale, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cryptocurrency, dark matter, decarbonisation, degrowth, distributed ledger, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, fiat currency, Food sovereignty, full employment, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, High speed trading, high-speed rail, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, land reform, liberation theology, liquidity trap, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, megastructure, Modern Monetary Theory, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rewilding, RFID, Robert Solow, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, synthetic biology, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, wage slave, Washington Consensus

These SAPs were instruments of the postwar American economic empire, which was unlike the older empires in that it did not insist on ownership of its economic colonies; it only owned their debts and their profits, no more than that. The best empire yet, in terms of efficiency, and the neoliberal order was all about efficiency, in its purest economic definition: the speed and frictionlessness with which money moved from the poor to the rich. So there was a reason it was called the Washington Consensus. Its SAP requirements, made of any country that wanted a bail-out in the form of further loans, came only by adhering to the following conditions: a reduction in public spending; tax reforms, especially reducing taxes on corporations; privatization of state-owned enterprises; market-based interest and currency exchange rates, with no government controls on these; a set of strong investor rights, so investors could no longer be given haircuts (the long hair provisions, so-called); and the massive deregulation of everything: market activities, business practices, labor and environmental protections.

The American empire had been mostly economic and undeclared, and so had never been understood or acknowledged to be an empire by Americans themselves, despite their eight hundred military bases around the world, and the fact that their military budget was larger than all the other nations’ on Earth combined. So you could get things like the Washington Consensus, in which the World Bank and the IMF and even the WTO had been used as instruments of American hegemony, forcing small poor countries to join the world as a new kind of colony, American colonies in all but name, or else suffer even worse fates. Even the Chinese with their Belt and Road Initiative, and their local power in Asia, were not as bad as the Americans when it came to imperial self-regard pretending to be charity, as in the structural adjustment procedures at the end of the twentieth century, which had wrecked local subsistence so that entire countries could become cash crop providers for American markets.


pages: 238 words: 73,121

Does Capitalism Have a Future? by Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Stephen Hoye, Audible Studios

affirmative action, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, company town, creative destruction, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global village, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, loose coupling, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, too big to fail, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

The entire European continent from the Urals to the Atlantic is unified in a single geopolitical and economic bloc, with Germany as its economic engine and Russia as the supplier of labor, raw materials, and military force. In this version of events, American hegemony fades away much sooner from world geopolitics. A social democratic and paternalistic Europe together with a recast U.S.S.R. would have enough reasons and power to oppose the neoliberal Washington consensus. The geopolitically and ideologically marginalized America, however, would not be doing too badly economically. Given the strengths of the European example, Washington might find the spirit to adopt the political measures necessary to generate internal demand and establish its own trading bloc with Latin America and China.


Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages by Carlota Pérez

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, distributed generation, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, full employment, Hyman Minsky, informal economy, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, new economy, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, post-industrial society, profit motive, railway mania, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, technological determinism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

There can be persistent social demands or violent outbreaks, which can take many different forms as was seen in the 1848 revolutions in Europe or much later in the various revolts, the coups d’état and the acute social tensions of the 1920s and 1930s. The demonstrations against the global free market policies of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in their Seattle meeting, in November 1999, may well have marked the beginning of growing open international political pressure to change the so-called ‘Washington consensus’. Whatever the manifestation, the political pressures calling for action finally propel the required changes. The financial collapse that usually marks the end of this period is the final and often the strongest instrument of persuasion to bring about the necessary changes. Once the new ‘match’ has been achieved through the articulation of an appropriate mode of growth, a process of recoupling and convergence ensues.


pages: 283 words: 77,272

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful by Glenn Greenwald

Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Clive Stafford Smith, collateralized debt obligation, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Brooks, deskilling, financial deregulation, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, Julian Assange, mandatory minimum, nuremberg principles, Ponzi scheme, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, too big to fail, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

Moreover, that attack resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, the displacement of millions more, and the total devastation of a nation of 26 million people. But the very idea that American leaders responsible for it should be held legally accountable under the Nuremberg principles, or condemned as having done anything criminal, is violently rejected by the Washington consensus whenever the idea is brought up at all. Jackson’s warning that the Nuremberg proceedings would be meaningful only if their principles bound all nations in the future, including the nations that had convened the trial, has simply been brushed aside. The Nuremberg trials also have relevance to a key claim repeatedly made by opponents of torture prosecutions, those in the media and the political class who oppose prosecutions for torture sanctioned by the Bush administration: namely, that it would be terribly unfair to punish people for having done something that DOJ lawyers had told them they could.


pages: 277 words: 80,703

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle by Silvia Federici

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Community Supported Agriculture, declining real wages, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, financial independence, fixed income, gentrification, global village, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, labor-force participation, land tenure, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Occupy movement, planetary scale, Scramble for Africa, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, the market place, tontine, trade liberalization, UNCLOS, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

By the late 1970s, two decades of international struggles that shook up the foundations of the capitalist accumulation process came to an end, put on the defensive by the engineering of a still continuing global crisis. Starting with the oil embargo of 1974, a long period of capitalist experimentation in class “decomposition” began under the guises of the “Washington Consensus,” neoliberalism, and “globalization.” From “Zero Growth” (in 1974-75) to the debt crisis and then to industrial relocation and the imposition of structural adjustment on regions of the former colonial world, a new world was forced into existence, radically changing the balance of power between workers and capital worldwide.


pages: 272 words: 76,154

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

., Thomas Piontek, and Andrew Metrick. “The Lehman Brothers Bankruptcy A: Overview.” Yale Program on Financial Stability Case Study 2014-3A-V1, Yale School of Management, New Haven, CT, October 2014. https://som.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/001-2014-3A-V1-LehmanBrothers-A-REVA.pdf. Williamson, John. “The Washington Consensus as Policy Prescription for Development.” Lecture delivered at the Institute for International Economics, World Bank, Washington, DC, January 13, 2004. Wilshire. “Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index.” December 31, 2016. https://wilshire.com/Portals/0/analytics/indexes/membership/wilshire-5000-index-membership.pdf.


pages: 263 words: 77,786

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Countries that turned away from central planning and embraced market economics saw sizable economic gains as a result. The most remarkable example was China, which by embracing market reforms was beginning its long and successful ascent that would bring hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty. “The Washington Consensus,” a set of free market economic principles developed jointly by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the US Treasury, all based in Washington, became the bible for addressing economic crises around the globe. In February 1999, Time magazine enshrined the state of global economic thinking with a dramatic cover that anointed Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and his deputy Lawrence Summers as the “Committee to Save the World.”


pages: 840 words: 202,245

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick

Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, desegregation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, inventory management, invisible hand, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price stability, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, V2 rocket, value at risk, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

A cause of the crisis was the deregulatory policy of the Clinton administration, which had insisted that nations like Korea end capital controls, which had until then restricted the inflow of international capital. This policy once again reflected the free market attitudes now ascendant in the major rich nations and international agencies like the International Monetary Fund, policies generally known as the Washington Consensus. But the capital flows reached speculative heights because interest rates offered in these nations were so high and, because their currencies were pegged to the dollar, there was no currency risk. Some $250 billion of foreign money was invested in 1996 alone, an increasing amount going into spurious real estate projects.

., prl.1, prl.2, 7.1 Trump, Donald Tsai, Gerald Tudor Investment Tunney, John, 7.1, 7.2 Turner, Ed Turner, Ted, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5, 13.1 Turner Broadcasting Network (TNT), 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 Tuttle, Holmes Twentieth Century Fox, 7.1, 8.1, 8.2 Two Lucky People (Friedman and Friedman), 2.1 Tyco, 17.1, 17.2 Tynan, Kenneth UBS, 19.1, 19.2, 19.3, 19.4 Uhler, James Carvel, prl.1, prl.2 Uhler, Lewis, ix–x, prl.1, prl.2, 2.1, 7.1, 7.2 underwriters, 1.1, 6.1, 13.1, 13.2, 16.1, 16.2, 16.3, 17.1, 17.2, 17.3, 17.4, 17.5, 17.6, 17.7, 18.1, 19.1 unemployment insurance, 2.1, 2.2, 7.1 unemployment rate, prl.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 6.1, 8.1, 8.2, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4, 9.5, 10.1, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, 14.4, 14.5, 17.1, 19.1, 19.2, 19.3, 19.4, 19.5, 19.6 United Technologies, 4.1, 5.1 Unruh, Jesse Updike, John uranium, 4.1, 5.1, 14.1 Utah International, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 12.1, 12.2 Value at Risk (VAR), 15.1, 15.2, 15.3, 15.4, 15.5, 17.1, 17.2 Vanguard Funds Van Horn, Rob Versailles, Treaty of (1919) Veterans Administration (VA), 18.1, 18.2 Viacom, 8.1, 16.1 Vietnam War, prl.1, 1.1, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 7.1, 10.1, 12.1, 19.1 Vilar, Alberto Viner, Jacob, 2.1, 2.2 Vinson & Elkins Volcker, Paul, 11.1, 11.2; background of, 3.1, 6.1, 11.3; in Carter administration, 11.4, 11.5, 11.6; as Federal Reserve chairman, itr.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 9.1, 9.2, 11.7, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 14.1, 15.1, 18.1, 19.1, 19.2; Greenspan compared with, 14.2, 14.3, 14.4, 14.5, 14.6; inflation policy of, 6.5, 6.6, 6.7, 6.8, 9.3, 11.8, 11.9, 11.10, 11.11, 11.12, 11.13, 11.14, 11.15, 11.16, 11.17, 14.7, 14.8; interest rates policy of, 6.9, 6.10, 9.4, 11.18, 11.19, 11.20, 11.21, 11.22, 15.2, 18.2, 18.3; in Reagan administration, 11.23, 11.24, 11.25; tax policy of, 11.26, 11.27, 11.28; as Treasury undersecretary, 3.2, 3.3, 6.11, 6.12, 6.13, 9.5, 9.6; unemployment rate and, 11.29, 11.30 Voorhis, Jerry Vranos, Michael, 12.1, 18.1 Wachtel, Paul wage controls, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 14.1 wage levels, itr.1, prl.1, prl.2, prl.3, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, 2.9, 2.10, 2.11, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 4.1, 4.2, 8.1, 8.2, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 10.1, 10.2, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 11.5, 12.1, 12.2, 13.1, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, 16.1, 17.1, 17.2, 19.1, 19.2 Walker, Charls Wall, Danny Wallace, George Wallich, Henry Wall Street, x, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 3.1, 4.1, 6.1, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 11.1, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 12.4, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4, 13.5, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, 14.4, 14.5, 15.1, 15.2, 15.3, 15.4, 15.5, 15.6, 16.1, 16.2, 16.3, 16.4, 16.5, 16.6, 17.1, 17.2, 18.1, 19.1, 19.2, 19.3, 19.4, 19.5, 19.6, 19.7, 19.8, 19.9, 19.10, 19.11, 19.12, 19.13, 19.14 Wall Street Journal, 2.1, 6.1, 16.1, 16.2, 17.1, 17.2 Wal-Mart, 8.1, 8.2 Walras, Léon Walters, Barbara Walton, Bud Walton, Sam, 8.1, 8.2, 12.1 Warner, Douglas, III Warner-Amex Cable, 8.1, 8.2 Warner Bros., 7.1, 8.1, 8.2 Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, 8.1, 8.2 Warner Communications, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5, 12.1 Warren, Earl, prl.1, 10.1 Washington Consensus Wasserman, Lew, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1 Wasserstein, Bruce, 4.1, 16.1 Watergate scandal, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 9.1, 10.1, 14.1 Waterman, Robert, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3 Watkins, Sherron Waxman, Henry Weaver, Karen Weidenbaum, Murray, 3.1, 9.1, 11.1 Weill, Jessica Weill, Joan, 16.1, 16.2, 16.3, 16.4 Weill, Marc Weill, Max Weill, Sanford I.


pages: 275 words: 84,980

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives) by David Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, creative destruction, credit crunch, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, index card, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, Northern Rock, Pingit, prediction markets, price stability, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social graph, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons

I think a good place to start is, again, with In Safe Hands, the Long Finance exploration of the world of financial services in 2050 (Ringland 2011). There are four scenarios set out in this report and they seem to me as good a basis as any for constructing narratives about the future of money (figure 26). These scenarios are not random: they are constructed along two axes. The first asks whether the ‘Washington consensus’ around central banks and international monetary institutions will continue (I do not think it will) and the second asks whether the communities that redefine money will be wholly virtual or will remain anchored in the mundane. Long Finance scenarios for 2050. Personally, I think that the community consensus scenarios of cities and ‘affinity groups’ are a plausible vision.


Propaganda and the Public Mind by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, deindustrialization, digital divide, European colonialism, experimental subject, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, interchangeable parts, language acquisition, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, one-state solution, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, Washington Consensus

The U.S. has come in with crop destruction programs and counterinsurgency operations which have destroyed their coca crops, and now they’re starving. So they’re among those who are protesting, though the immediate causes are different. Bolivia is one of the poorest countries of the world. So first they are driven to coca production by the ‘’Washington consensus” and IMF/World Bank programs which say, You’ve got to open your country up to agriculture and other imports and you have to be a rational peasant producing for the agro-export market trying to maximize profit. You put those conditions together and it spells c-o-c-a. A rational peasant producing for the agro-export market when the country is being flooded by subsidized Western agricultural production is going to be producing coca.


pages: 278 words: 82,069

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Organized labor, pounded by years of unionbusting and deindustrialization, slipped below 10 percent of the U.S. private-sector workforce and seemed to disappear altogether from the popular consciousness. The opposition was ceasing to oppose, but the market was now safe, its supposedly endless array of choice substituting for the lack of choice on the ballot. Various names were applied to this state of affairs. In international circles the grand agreement was called the “Washington Consensus”; economics writer Daniel Yergin called it the “market consensus”; New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman coined the phrase “golden straitjacket” to describe the absence of political options. While once “people thought” there were ways to order human affairs other than through the free market, Friedman insisted, those choices now no longer existed.


pages: 330 words: 83,319

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder by Sean McFate

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, drone strike, escalation ladder, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, false flag, hive mind, index fund, invisible hand, John Markoff, joint-stock company, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, nuclear taboo, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technoutopianism, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero day, zero-sum game

Unlike his peers, he spoke fluent Farsi and had spent the 1970s traveling in Afghanistan and Iran. What he saw that his contemporaries missed was a “parallel international system” festering dangerously.13 Olson was lambasted as a kook. As he now recalls, “The Blob ate my lunch, and then ate me.” The Blob is the groupthink of the Washington consensus. Now we know that Olson was correct. What he saw, decades before anyone else did, was the post-9/11 world. General Eric Shinseki knows a thing or two about fighting insurgencies. As a young officer, he served two tours in Vietnam before his right foot was partially blown off by a land mine.


pages: 261 words: 86,905

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means by John Lanchester

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, Basel III, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Swan, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, forward guidance, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, High speed trading, hindsight bias, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kodak vs Instagram, Kondratiev cycle, Large Hadron Collider, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, McJob, means of production, microcredit, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working poor, yield curve

So our guardrail has a one in a million chance of saving $6 million; so the VOSL tells us that it makes sense to spend $6 on our guardrail ($6 x 1,000,000 = $6,000,000), whereas spending $7 would be too much, and spending $5 would be a bargain. There’s something beautifully chilling and amoral about the VOSL. Washington consensus One name for the neoliberal economic model, as imposed on developing and emerging economies by the big international economic institutions. It was crisply summarized by the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra as “the dominant ideological orthodoxy before the economic crisis of 2008: that no nation can advance without reining in labor unions, eliminating trade barriers, ending subsidies, and, most importantly, minimizing the role of government.” 79 wealth The term is not precisely defined in economics, but the crucial point is that it refers to accumulated assets rather than to earnings.


pages: 223 words: 10,010

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

Nowhere was this dismantling of the post-war financial and state economic apparatus more welcome than in the offices of the City, Wall Street and the other financial centres. Although the pillars of the post-1979 pro-market economic experiment were embraced most strongly in the UK and the United States, the ripple effects were felt globally. The adoption of what became known as the ‘Washington consensus’ by the IMF and the World Bank—the belief in liberalised trade and labour markets—ensured that, throughout the 1990s, financial and trade liberalisation policies spread across the world economy—rich and poor nations alike. From the early 1980s, cross-border financial flows accelerated. To enable London to compete on equal terms with New York in the race for the world’s expanding pool of mobile capital, Mrs Thatcher set out to transform the City from a cosy, insular club into a global leader, able to win the race for the spoils of the new open borders.


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

“We cannot stop global change,” President Bill Clinton explained to the American people when signing the North American Free Trade Agreement into law in 1993. “We cannot repeal the international economic competition that is everywhere. We can only harness the energy to our benefit.” When Thomas Friedman’s book The Lexus and the Olive Tree was published in 1999, capitalism was riding high. This was the era of the dot-com boom and the Washington Consensus, a set of free-market reforms that rich countries were prescribing to poorer ones. Friedman explained that most developing countries viewed the new formula for economic prosperity as a “golden straitjacket.” The carefully thought-out reforms left little room for deviation, but if countries played by the rules and did what was asked of them, they would reap great rewards.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

GOOD QUESTION TO ASK YOURSELF WHEN TACKLING INCUMBENT COMPANIES (OR IDEAS) “How is their bread buttered?” “What is it that they can’t afford to say or think?” “CONSENSUS” SHOULD SET OFF YOUR SPIDEY SENSE “Somehow, people have to learn that consensus is a huge problem. There’s no ‘arithmetic consensus’ because it doesn’t require a consensus. But there is a Washington consensus. There is a climate consensus. In general, consensus is how we bully people into pretending that there’s nothing to see. ‘Move along, everyone.’ I think that, in part, you should learn that people don’t naturally come to high levels of agreement unless something is either absolutely clear, in which case consensus isn’t present, or there’s an implied threat of violence to livelihood or self.”

von Ahn, Luis: “‘It would be in front of the Google Pittsburgh office and it would say ‘Duolingo is hiring.’” Waitzkin, Joshua: “‘LIVE ALL IN.’” Weinstein, Eric: “Somehow, people have to learn that consensus is a huge problem. There’s no arithmetic consensus because it doesn’t require a consensus. But there is a Washington consensus. There is a climate consensus. In general, consensus is how we bully people into pretending that there’s nothing to see—move along, everyone. And so I think that in part, you should start to learn that people don’t naturally come to high levels of agreement unless something is either absolutely clear, in which case consensus isn’t present, or there’s an implied threat of violence to livelihood or self.”


pages: 740 words: 217,139

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, John Perry Barlow, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, means of production, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), spice trade, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

See Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire, p. 75; and Max Rheinstein, “Introduction,” in Max Weber, Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), p. xlviii. 13 Lybyer, The Government of the Ottoman Empire, pp. 36–37. 14 Feldman, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, pp. 50–52. To this day, the government of the Turkish Republic tightly controls the Muslim religious establishment. 15 “Binding constraint” is taken from Dani Rodrik, Ricardo Hausmann, and Andres Velasco, “Growth Diagnostics,” in Narcís Serra and Joseph E. Stiglitz, eds., The Washington Consensus Reconsidered (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). There were many other constraints on the emergence of sustained economic growth in the Muslim world beyond poor property rights. Perhaps the most important was a growing intellectual unwillingness to engage in public debate over the social system itself as it was being overtaken by the West, particularly after the conflict with the Safavids at the end of the seventeenth century.

. ———. 1999. Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf. Sen, Amartya K. 1999. “Democracy as a Universal Value.” Journal of Democracy 10:3–17. Sengupta, Somini. 2006. “Often Parched, India Struggles to Tap the Monsoon.” New York Times, October 1. Serra, Narcís, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, eds. 2008. The Washington Consensus Reconsidered. New York: Oxford University Press. Service, Elman R. 1971. Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective. 2d ed. New York: Random House. Shapiro, Martin M. 1981. Courts: A Comparative and Political Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sharma, Ram S. 1968.


pages: 351 words: 93,982

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies by Otto Scharmer, Katrin Kaufer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Fractional reserve banking, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor, Zipcar

The Arab revolution of 2011 that was ignited in Tunisia and Egypt is directed against the last strongholds of those cynical and corrupt 1.0 regimes that have continued to exist in North Africa, where Western powers have repeatedly turned a blind eye to civil rights violations in exchange for cheap oil. Throughout the late twentieth century, the World Bank (among others) facilitated a push toward Economy 2.0 institutional innovations. The so-called Washington consensus called for market-oriented changes (deregulation, privatization, less government, and less government spending) that guided World Bank policies from 1979 to 2009. As various countries within Africa now move from 1.0 and 2.0 to 3.0 on a variety of paths, questions remain: how to help fragile states whose core societal functions and institutions have been deeply disrupted?


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil.10 For emerging countries, escaping poverty and improving living standards required joining the capitalist caravan. In 1974, Deng Xiaoping discovered that China had only US$38,000 in foreign currency to pay for his delegation's trip to the UN. Deng subsequently drove change, masterminding China's oxymoronic socialist market economy. The path followed the Washington Consensus—specific policy prescriptions considered necessary for the development of emerging countries. To foster economic growth, international aid agencies and NGOs advised macroeconomic stabilization, opening up trade and foreign investment, deregulation, and the adoption of free markets. This encouraged developed countries to relocate or set up production facilities in places with cheap local labor or resources.


Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Food sovereignty, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, late capitalism, means of production, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, Philip Mirowski, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, shareholder value, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, young professional, zero-sum game

At the time, critical intellectuals mainly characterized neoliberalism as something the Global North imposed on the 50 u n d o in g t h e d e m o s Global South — something that reconfigured as it intensified NorthSouth inequalities, something that resecured the South as a source of cheap resources, labor, and production in the aftermath of colonialism, something that was perfectly compatible with coups, support of brutal dictatorships and other political interventions, and something that could also be carried out with the velvet glove of International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization governance, and, eventually, NAFTA-like trade agreements. While students of neoimperialism in the 1970s and early 1980s grasped the importance of neoliberal economic experiments in parts of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, they rarely detected its presence back in the metropole. The “Washington Consensus” affirming free-market policies over Keynesian ones was still more than a decade off. Thatcher and Reagan had not yet come to power. European welfare states still appeared to be the beacon and the future of the civilized West, and the question for most of those leaning left in the mid-1970s was not how to defend them, but whether they could be pushed further toward — or beyond — social democracy.


The Despot's Accomplice: How the West Is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy by Brian Klaas

Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, citizen journalism, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, moral hazard, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Steve Jobs, trade route, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, unemployed young men, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

This has become particularly threatening to the Western model in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008–9, because China’s economy grew by 9 per cent in 2009, while the economy of countries like Japan contracted by more than 5 per cent.30 And, until late 2008, “nearly every top Chinese official still lived by Deng Xiaoping’s old advice to build China’s strength while maintaining a low profile in international affairs.”31 Now, Beijing is promoting its pathway of econoÂ�mic, but not political, liberalization as the Beijing Consensus, a € 206 THE BEAR AND THE DRAGON term specifically modeled to parrot and mock the liberal Washington Consensus. China’s government is actively trying to export it. â•… As the strength of their models grows in the eyes of prospective adopters from Latin America to Sub-Saharan Africa, China and Russia are both using a multitude of tools to actively replicate similar governance around the globe. This is not to say that there is no genuine standalone allure to China’s economic success or to the Kremlin’s ability to wield disproportionate might on the global stage.


pages: 381 words: 101,559

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, game design, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, income inequality, interest rate derivative, it's over 9,000, John Meriwether, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, Network effects, New Journalism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, one-China policy, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, power law, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time value of money, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Of course, there was no coordination between the scenario the lab had produced and the wild card Steve and I were secretly ready to play, but this was a pretty good fit. Russia could exempt Japan from its gold currency deal and still placate China by inviting it to join in its plan to sideline the dollar. I sat in our simulated Chinese capital listening to my Harvard and RAND teammates discussing how to punish Japan for deviating from the Washington Consensus free trade paradigm, but my mind was elsewhere, literally waiting for the phone to ring. A few minutes later, our lab observers informed us that a communiqué had come in from Russia requesting a summit conference. This was good news; it meant Steve had convinced his teammates to let him play the gold wild card.


pages: 329 words: 102,469

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, centre right, clean water, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Peace of Westphalia, postnationalism / post nation state, Project for a New American Century, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

Underlying the starkest version of this vision is an equally breathtaking analytical premise: that there is now “a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.”18 This recalls Francis Fukuyama’s argument for a “worldwide liberal revolution” in his hugely influential article of 1989 and subsequent book on The End of History,19 and the so-called Washington Consensus of the IMF and World Bank in the 1990s. The bald simplicity of this claim for a single sustainable model, with its implicit image of America as a model for the future of all humankind, has offended many Europeans, Africans, Asians, and others who have themselves long been committed to such a post-Enlightenment, global meliorist aspiration.


pages: 371 words: 98,534

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy by George Magnus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business process, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, Malacca Straits, means of production, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old age dependency ratio, open economy, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, speech recognition, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, urban planning, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

In the wake of the dislocations and consequences of the financial crisis, however, an economically exhausted and politically compromised US, confronted by a still economically confident China, changed tack. In 2013, it began to pursue a new policy, the ‘Pivot to Asia’, spurred partly by an emerging discussion about the Beijing consensus, or Chinese-style development model as an alternative to the hitherto dominant Washington consensus. American policy was doubtless driven by concerns not to allow a Beijing consensus to plant irretrievably strong roots in Asia. According to a former national security official, Michael Green, ‘American policy in the Far East has for a long time been driven by its reluctance to tolerate any other power establishing exclusive hegemonic control over Asia or the Pacific.’28 Things have moved on under the Trump administration.


Corbyn by Richard Seymour

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, first-past-the-post, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, land value tax, liberal world order, mass immigration, means of production, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, Snapchat, stakhanovite, systematic bias, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, working-age population, éminence grise

While the Conservatives are opportunistic in claiming that the economic mess was one made by Labour, their mendacity should not be allowed to obscure the extent to which New Labour created a British haven for banks and speculators.60 As the crisis struck, Brown’s position was suddenly elevated and dignified, whereas it had been increasingly frustrated and diminished beforehand. Having developed his relationships with Washington and Wall Street power-brokers since those hesternal days of the early 1990s, and taken a leading role in negotiating Britain’s integration into the Washington Consensus, he was well-placed to take part in the globally orchestrated interventions to prevent a banking collapse and sustain economic demand – a role for which he gained considerable political credit with the electorate. The net effect of these interventions was to heighten the power of the banks: in effect, it was not so much that failing banks were nationalised, as that the Treasury was semi-privatised and put at the disposal of the City.61 They were to be followed by years of bracing austerity to cover the costs of bailing out the banks, while the underlying financial infrastructure was left more or less intact.62 Brown at least signalled a mild shift from the New Labour era by raising the top rate of tax for the first time, and declaring the era of fully free markets over.


pages: 388 words: 99,023

The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World by Jonathan Hillman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, capital controls, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, high-speed rail, intermodal, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Malacca Straits, megaproject, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, trade route, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, union organizing, Washington Consensus

“Economic interdependence spurred mutual cooperation among the peoples along the Silk Road,” it observed before asserting, “restoration of the historic relationships and economic ties between those peoples is an important element of ensuring their sovereignty as well as the success of democratic and market reforms.”17 This was the Washington Consensus repackaged as a Silk Road. The U.S. government dusted off the Silk Road label a decade later, during the war in Afghanistan, as Chapter 7 describes. Most of these efforts continue in some form, as does the region’s need for better connectivity. In Central Asia, it takes two days, on average, to travel from one main city to another in a neighboring country.18 Everyone agrees on the need for greater connectivity, but like the Soviet planners who created the region’s rusting infrastructure, each new vision reflects its authors’ interests.


pages: 493 words: 98,982

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, global supply chain, helicopter parent, High speed trading, immigration reform, income inequality, Khan Academy, laissez-faire capitalism, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler

Replying to economists’ predictions that leaving the European Union would bring economic hardship to the United Kingdom, a leading Brexit proponent replied, “The people in this country have had enough of experts.” 78 For his part, Obama struggled to make sense of the political earthquake that occurred at the end of his presidency. In 2018, two years after Trump was elected to succeed him, Obama conceded that proponents of globalization “did not adapt quickly enough to the fact that there were people being left behind.” The Washington consensus “got a little too comfortable. Particularly after the Cold War, you had this period of great smugness on the part of America and American elites thinking we got this all figured out.” 79 But Obama’s primary diagnosis of polarized politics in the age of Trump had to do with the public’s inability to agree on basic facts.


pages: 377 words: 110,427

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz by Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Legislative Exchange Council, Benjamin Mako Hill, bitcoin, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, deliberate practice, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, failed state, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, full employment, functional programming, Hacker News, Howard Zinn, index card, invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Gruber, Lean Startup, low interest rates, More Guns, Less Crime, peer-to-peer, post scarcity, power law, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, semantic web, single-payer health, SpamAssassin, SPARQL, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, unbiased observer, wage slave, Washington Consensus, web application, WikiLeaks, working poor, zero-sum game

The term socialism has become so watered down that it polls roughly equal with capitalism among the under-30 set—apparently it now means anything to the left of austere neoliberalism (except file sharing, of course). If there was ever a time for a new program, this would seem to be it. The economic crisis has shattered the Washington Consensus more than a thousand Chomsky op-eds could, while the Internet has made it possible to organize people by the million. But the left can’t seem to move beyond its reactive stance. If you want books that criticize the policies of the Bush administration, you can fill up a whole library. But if you want books on what to do instead, where do you go?


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

Economically, it advocates the classical minimal state but with some modifications – most importantly, it accepts the central bank with note issue monopoly, while the classical liberals thought that there should be competition in the production of money too. In political terms, neo-liberals do not openly oppose democracy, as the classical liberals did. But many of them are willing to sacrifice democracy for the sake of private property and the free market. Neo-liberalism is also known, especially in developing countries, as the Washington Consensus view, referring to the fact that it is strongly advocated by the three most powerful economic organizations in the world, all based in Washington, DC, namely, the US Treasury, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The 1870–1913 period did not actually see universal liberalism on the international front.


pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

So too are the South Centre and the Third World Network, which are building solidarity among global South governments and civil society organisations respectively, to tackle not only debt but also structural adjustment, unfair trade rules, intellectual property issues and the imbalance of power in global governance institutions. The Bretton Woods Project is pushing hard for increased transparency and democracy in the World Bank and the IMF. And the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) is building a real-life alternative to the neoliberal Washington Consensus by organising regional economic integration in Latin America and creating an alternative currency for trade, with a focus on cooperation rather than competition and with an eye towards improving social welfare rather than just corporate profits. The battle for a global minimum wage is still in its infancy, but there are impressive movements building in this direction – for example, the Asian Floor Wage campaign is fighting to establish a transnational minimum wage for garment workers across Asia, one of the most vulnerable workforces in the world.


pages: 375 words: 105,586

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, collaborative consumption, Corn Laws, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial independence, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, future of work, Gail Bradbrook, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, hive mind, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jevons paradox, land reform, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, post-industrial society, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Rutger Bregman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

In that respect, this book is intended essentially as a defence of food sovereignty principles and a working through of some of their difficulties. The difficulties, I’d argue, are less severe than those bedevilling other kinds of political economy. Suppose we tried to build a global ‘Nyéléni consensus’ to outflank the present ‘Washington consensus’ of global free-market integration? I think such a reboot would improve fairness, human well-being and global stability, both political and ecological. But, as Agarwal reminds us, it’s not a panacea. The Auto-System In many places, it would be better to work on building such consensus by fostering local autonomies rather than agitating against state power.


Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, colonial rule, corporate personhood, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, invisible hand, liberation theology, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuremberg principles, one-state solution, open borders, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

Stephen Zunes, one of the leading scholarly analysts of these matters, points out that “at a critical point in the nation’s effort to become more self-sufficient [in the early 1950s], the U.S. government forced Bolivia to use its scarce capital not for its own development, but to compensate the former mine owners and repay its foreign debts.”1 The economic policies forced on Bolivia in those years were a precursor of the structural adjustment programs imposed on the continent thirty years later, under the terms of the neoliberal “Washington consensus,” which has generally had harmful effects wherever its strictures have been observed. By now, the victims of neoliberal market fundamentalism are coming to include the rich countries, where financial liberalization is bringing about the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s and leading to massive state intervention in a desperate effort to rescue collapsing financial institutions.


pages: 397 words: 112,034

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

And although Australia’s political cycles have not always mirrored those in the United States and Britain (indeed, it is striking how Australian and British electorates have swung in opposite directions since the 1980s), Australian policymakers have been significantly influenced by political and intellectual fashions and trends emanating from Britain and America. In particular, since the 1980s Australian government have for the most part been committed to the so-called Washington consensus of trade liberalization, privatization, and deregulation of financial and other markets. Moreover, most of Australia’s major financial institutions have been managed by executives originally from, or with substantial experience gained in, the American or British markets for at least part of the 1990s or early 2000s.


pages: 429 words: 120,332

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens by Nicholas Shaxson

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, high net worth, income inequality, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, New Journalism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, out of africa, passive income, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transfer pricing, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

For much of the nineteenth century, free traders had dominated policy in the United States and much of Europe: It was self-evident, many people thought, that free trade delivered prosperity and brought peace by creating economic interdependencies that made it harder to wage war. It was a bit like an argument memorably made in the 1990s by journalist Thomas Friedman, who said that no two countries with a McDonald’s—that symbol of free trade and the “Washington Consensus”—had ever fought a war with each other.4 Keynes believed this, for a while. “I was brought up, like most Englishmen, to respect free trade,” he wrote in the Yale Review in 1933, “almost as a part of the moral law. I regarded ordinary departures from it as being at the same time an imbecility and an outrage.”5 He had begun to see then that finance is different.


pages: 406 words: 113,841

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, basic income, benefit corporation, big-box store, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, government statistician, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, job automation, Kickstarter, land bank, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

For most of the rest of Queen Victoria’s near-seventy-year reign, “the great unwashed” were either left to find their own ways through terrain of hunger, homelessness, and disease, or were corralled into the sorts of ghastly workhouse settings made infamous by the writings of Charles Dickens. In America, the South in particular took the Victorian lesson to heart, though to a lesser degree so too did the rest of the country. As did most of Europe. After all, Great Britain was the dominant power of the age, its economic prescriptions as hard to avoid as, say, the Washington consensus’s emphasis on opening up markets to international trade, privatizing public services, and deregulation a century and a half later. Coercive poor law politics, shaped around workhouses, poor houses, and other near-prison-like conditions for confining and attending to the subsistence needs of the poor was, as a consequence, the dominant response to poverty on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century.


pages: 342 words: 114,118

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, British Empire, centre right, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, late capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, Washington Consensus, young professional, zero-sum game

The same global audience that marveled at the images of an ascendant superpower during the opening ceremonies in Beijing now felt their livelihoods endangered by that flaw at the heart of the global economy. People who had tacitly accepted the consensus of American-led globalization now saw both its failure and its potential replacement. “The emergence of a Beijing consensus directly challenged the Washington consensus,” Ching Cheong told me. “The financial meltdown showed clearly that it is the greed of those capitalists that brought a lot of problems to a lot of people. That was the time that people saw the failure of the American model versus the success of Chinese authoritarianism.” * * * — A year later, in the fall of 2009, I traveled to China for Barack Obama’s first visit to that country.


pages: 409 words: 125,611

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

CHINA’S ROADMAP* CHINA IS ABOUT TO ADOPT ITS 11TH FIVE-YEAR PLAN, SETting the stage for the continuation of probably the most remarkable economic transformation in history, while improving the well-being of almost a quarter of the world’s population. Never before has the world seen such sustained growth; never before has there been so much poverty reduction. Part of the key to China’s long-run success has been its almost unique combination of pragmatism and vision. While much of the rest of the developing world, following the Washington Consensus, has been directed at a quixotic quest for higher GDP, China has once again made clear that it seeks sustainable and more equitable increases in real living standards. China realizes that it has entered a phase of economic growth that is imposing enormous—and unsustainable—demands on the environment.


pages: 388 words: 125,472

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It by Owen Jones

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, disinformation, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Dyson, Jon Ronson, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, night-watchman state, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, Overton Window, plutocrats, popular capitalism, post-war consensus, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

China is a rapidly expanding competitor, along with other booming economies such as India and Brazil. The 2008 financial collapse has helped to speed up a global shift in economic power to the East. The US once enjoyed near-hegemony over Latin America, a position initially enshrined by the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and, in modern times, the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’. But a wave of left-leaning administrations swept to power across Latin America in the noughties, asserting an independent course. The disastrous Iraq War undermined US military prestige and possible domestic support for military interventions, and perversely boosted the influence of its arch-enemy Iran across the Middle East.


pages: 386 words: 122,595

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden (New York: Penguin, 2007). 37. William Easterly, “Was Development Assistance a Mistake,” American Economic Review, vol. 97, no. 2 (May 2007). 38. Craig Burnside and David Dollar, “Aid, Policies, and Growth,” American Economic Review, vol. 90, no. 4 (September 2000), pp. 847–68. 39. Dani Rodrik, “Goodbye Washington Consensus, Hello Washington Confusion? A Review of the World Bank’s Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reform,” Journal of Economic Literature, vol. XLIV (December 2006). EPILOGUE. LIFE IN 2050 1. “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” The Economist, May 18, 2001. 2. Denise Grady, “In Quest to Cure Rare Diseases, Some Get Left Out,” New York Times, November 16, 1999. 3.


pages: 497 words: 123,718

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, airline deregulation, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bob Geldof, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, full employment, global village, high net worth, land bank, land reform, large denomination, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Treasury Department 88, 240, 252 Uzbekistan 200 VA Tech 23–14 Venezuela: Chavez government 273 coup attempt in 3, 25 foreign debt 230, 233 oil industry 154 Vietnam 229 foreign debt 225, 243 Volcker, Paul 78, 82 Wälde, Thomas 147 Walker, Peter Lord 138 Wallach, Lori 273 Watson-Clark, Nigel 113–14, 115–17, 121–22, 124, 127–30 When Corporations Rule the World (Korten) 4 Williamson, Craig 26 Witt, Dan 134–35, 136–39, 144–45 Washington consensus see neoliberalism Wolfowitz, Paul 27, 126 World Bank 19, 23, 135, 253, 275 Argentina and 169–73 Congo and 100 conflicts of interest 243–44 culture of lending 157, 158, 173–74 debt relief and 221–22, 224, 226, 237, 240–41, 242–46, 250–51 dictators and 158, 159 export credit agencies and 199, 201, 202, 204, 212, 213, 214 investigations of fraud 158, 162–73 Iraq and 151–52 Liberia and 159–67 Nigeria and 167–69 offshore banking and 43, 234 Philippines and 175–84 privatization and 100, 191, 277 protests against 266 structural adjustment programs 191–91, 265–66 World Economic Forum 126–27 World Forum on Globalization and Global Trade 271 World Gold Council 244 World Social Forum 271 World Trade Organization 4, 188, 189, 275 Agreement on Agriculture 271–72 agricultural trade and 186–87, 271–72 Doha Round 272–73 establishment of 267–68 export credit agencies and 200, 215 foreign sales corporations and 51 protests against 266, 270–73 Uruguay Round 215 Yamani, Sheikh Ahmad Zaki 145 Yemen, foreign debt 225, 243 Yergin, Daniel 139 Zaire see Congo Zambia: foreign debt 230, 247, 249 impact of IMF SAP 22 Zapatista Army of Liberation 272 Zedillo, Ernesto 238 Zeng Peiyan 126–27 Table of Contents Cover Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Introduction: New Confessions and Revelations from the World of Economic Hit Men 1 Global Empire: The Web of Control 2 Selling Money—and Dependency: Setting the Debt Trap 3 Dirty Money: Inside the Secret World of Offshore Banking 4 BCCI’s Double Game: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad 5 The Human Cost of Cheap Cell Phones 6 Mercenaries on the Front Lines in the New Scramble for Africa 7 Hijacking Iraq’s Oil Reserves: Economic Hit Men at Work 8 The World Bank and the $100 Billion Question 9 The Philippines, the World Bank, and the Race to the Bottom 10 Exporting Destruction 11 The Mirage of Debt Relief 12 Global Uprising: The Web of Resistance About the Authors Acknowledgments Appendix Index


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

Forty years ago, before the recent liberalization of foreign trade and the dying out of central-planning socialism and the lessening of corrupt regulation, the situation was much worse than a bottom billion out of seven. In those unhappy days before the word “globalization” became common and before the word “neoliberalism” was known and before the wretched Washington Consensus and before the horrible Friedman got his Nobel Prize in economics, the world faced a bottom four billion out of a total human population of merely five, with no prospects.2 The well-intentioned policies of job protection and import substitution and state ownership of the means of production had kept the poor very poor indeed.

See also North, Douglass Wall Street movies, 591 Walmart: opposition to, 625; on the poor, 74; and wages, 33 Walt Disney Corporation: monopoly by copyright, 176 Walton, Gary: Fulton, 668n9 Walton, Sam: share of profits, 22 Walzer, Michael: dominance of capital, 95; economic elite, 645; economists, 645; ethics of market, 644; the market, 561 Wang, Ning: A-Prime, C-Prime Theorem, 652n27; Chinese ideology, 288–289; Chinese politics, 519; recent China, 25 war: and economy, 86, 601. See also power and prosperity Warburton, Bishop: ethics, 622 Ward-Perkins, Bryan: loss of Roman technology, 662n6 Warner, Charles Dudley: The Gilded Age, 599 Washing Line: Rosling’s metaphor, 24, 627; in Saunders, 51 Washington Consensus, 74 water, drinkable: history, 27 Waterman, Anthony: acknowledged, xli; on Austen, 666n12; circulation of Smith, 170; French equality, xxxi, xxxii; on Malthus, 655n2; Malthusianism, 17; quotes on Lord Mayor’s Show, 678n10; Smithian policy, 386, 523; social engineering, 384; Whately, 237; what religionists want, 683n10; Wilberforce and Christianity, 170 Watson, Andrew: Islamic horticulture, 692n22 Watt, Ian: Defoe and slavery, 683n2; the novel, 256; quoting Defoe on narrative, 678n26 Watt, James: guilds, 462; patent monopoly, 40, 175, 176; standing, xxxiv Weatherford, Jack: Central Asian raiders, 656n22; Mongol property, 663n1, 663n2 Weber, Max: Calvinist guilt, 472; “capitalism,” 93; German sociological romanticism, 676n19; without limit, 312; 1950s modernization theory, 484; psychology of entrepreneur, 413, 503; rationality of modern bureaucracy, 598; religion, 508; and Simmel, 60; thrift, 277; work ethic of southerners, 87 Wedgwood, C.


pages: 493 words: 132,290

Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores by Greg Palast

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, back-to-the-land, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, centre right, Chelsea Manning, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Glass-Steagall Act, invisible hand, junk bonds, means of production, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, random walk, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Seymour Hersh, transfer pricing, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra

Correa, European-trained economist, fluent in five languages. Until he was tapped for the Finance post by Palacio, Dr. Correa taught economics at the University of Illinois, where his doctorate and publications included “Destabilizing Speculation in the Exchange Market: The Ecuadorian Case,” “The Washington Consensus in Latin America: A Quantitative Evaluation,” and so on. In other words, he had Larry Summers’s number. When the World Bank spoke in macroeconomic bullshit, Correa knew exactly what they really meant. Correa knows that Ecuador’s only hope, other than begging, is to take back control of its own oil.


pages: 538 words: 141,822

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

The seemingly inexorable march of freedom that began in the late 1980s has not only come to a halt but may have reversed its course. Expressions like “freedom recession” have begun to break out of the think-tank circuit and enter the public conversation. In a state of quiet desperation, a growing number of Western policymakers began to concede that the Washington Consensus—that set of dubious policies that once promised a neoliberal paradise at deep discounts—has been superseded by the Beijing Consensus, which boasts of delivering quick-and-dirty prosperity without having to bother with those pesky institutions of democracy. The West has been slow to discover that the fight for democracy wasn’t won back in 1989.


pages: 442 words: 130,526

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, business climate, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, Joseph Schumpeter, land bank, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, Meghnad Desai, middle-income trap, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, special economic zone, spectrum auction, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism, young professional

Mukesh Ambani was named the event’s cochair and an array of fellow tycoons, including Mallya, turned up to cheer him on. India’s apparently miraculous rebirth prompted an intellectual reevaluation. American economist Larry Summers, at the time a senior adviser to US President Barack Obama, gave a speech in 2010 floating the idea of a “Mumbai consensus” to replace the “Washington consensus,” the set of ideas that had long dominated Western thinking about international development. Until the mid-2000s fast-growing east Asian “tiger” economies like Taiwan and South Korea had been the stars of globalization. These were often labeled as “developmental states,” meaning those whose governments used industrial protection and public investment to build up export industries, before gradually opening them up to global competition.


pages: 518 words: 143,914

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Brooks, Dr. Strangelove, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, global supply chain, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, liberation theology, low skilled workers, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, stem cell, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

The concerted opposition of much of the world did nothing to prevent America from invading Iraq in 2003. America wields a huge influence over the Washington-based World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Even after the credit crunch, supporters of globalization tout what used to be called “the Washington consensus.” Antiglobalization protesters make little distinction between globalization and Americanization. If America is thus the symbol of all that is good and ill about today’s global capitalism, it is also the headquarters of the most advanced sort of capitalism—a capitalism that is less about tangible things than it is about intangibles such as images and information.


pages: 497 words: 143,175

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies by Judith Stein

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, desegregation, do well by doing good, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, intermodal, invisible hand, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-industrial society, post-oil, price mechanism, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yom Kippur War

Historically, years of rapid productivity growth have also been periods of strong upward pressure on wages.91 Wright’s explanation matches the characteristics of the 1990S upsurge. Nevertheless, the conclusion of the 1990s was that deficit reduction and trade, financial, and technological liberalization were the primary ingredients of prosperity. This ideological stew was promoted at home and also abroad, where it was known as the “Washington Consensus.” CAPITAL REMAKES THE WORLD: U.S. FINANCE VS. U.S. MANUFACTURING The ending of the Cold War led many Americans to conclude that the nation’s economic interests would replace strategic goals at the center of foreign policy. But a nation’s interests are never predetermined. Joseph Stiglitz, a member of Clinton’s CEA, recalled, “We in the Clinton administration did not have a vision of a new post-Cold War international order, but the business and financial community did: they saw new opportunities for profits.”92 Eastern Europe, Russia, and China needed investment, and China offered a huge, cheap workforce.


pages: 485 words: 133,655

Water: A Biography by Giulio Boccaletti

active transport: walking or cycling, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, energy transition, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, linear programming, loose coupling, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, text mining, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The notion that the state—not the government or the public bureaucracy, but the constitutional architecture that governs citizens’ lives together—was no longer the organizing principle of society was gaining traction. Markets, not politics, would provide the glue for society operating as one. By the eighties, the so-called Washington Consensus had led most developing countries to embrace free markets as well, as the primary means of capital allocation, and to privatize national assets in exchange for financial assistance from international institutions. Development economists shifted their attention to structural adjustments and market reforms.


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Over the past year I have been talking to former true believers and they’re like a priest who has lost faith in the Bible, but still has to go to church, and the congregation is sitting there but he doesn’t know what the Bible is any more …’ Adair Turner adds: ‘Yes, the fact is that intellectual systems – the whole efficient market theory, Washington consensus, free market deregulation system – can become like a religion’: Turner, A. (2009) ‘How to tame global finance’ Prospect, 27 August, http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/how-to-tame-global-finance/. 91 Mirowski, P. (2013), Never let a serious crisis go to waste, London: Verso. It has been heterodox economists, largely excluded from major economic journals, who have blown the whistle on economists acting on behalf of companies. 92 It’s worth asking economists who profess this whether they believe it because they think it’s true or because it’s in their self-interest to believe it.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The globalizers retort that, as the world’s biggest economy, America’s prosperity depends on the prosperity of the rest of the world. In the 1970s, the antiglobalizers began to regain their influence after being sidelined during the golden age. In the 1980s and particularly the 1990s, the proglobalizers not only regained the upper hand but expanded their creed into the Washington consensus. The protectionists did not go silent: worries about America’s soaring trade deficit colored all discussions about trade. Businesspeople complained that they were being squeezed by the combination of a prolonged recession (from 1979 to 1982) and the soaring value of the dollar (from 1980 to 1985).


pages: 665 words: 146,542

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power by Michel Aglietta

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, secular stagnation, seigniorage, shareholder value, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stochastic process, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, the scientific method, tontine, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus

Table 7.10 portrays the evolution of these roles after Bretton Woods, and the role that the IMF could have played if anything had come of the reform project studied by the C20.19 Table 7.10 Development of the IMF’s roles Mutual assistance fund for currents running temporary deficits (Bretton Woods) Agency issuing an international monetary asset (C20) Financial intermediary for development (Washington Consensus) International lender of last resort (new structure) Structure of the monetary and financial system Stable and adjustable parities, control of capital movements. SDR as an international unit of account for defining parities. Extension of flexible exchanges, and the development of sovereign debts.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

So regulators allowed the American banks to put their potential losses to one side when calculating their capital ratios. Rather than negotiate separately with the Latin American nations, the creditors formed a coordinated group, with the IMF in the lead role. But IMF money came with conditions, and usually required economic reform. The reforms, dubbed the “Washington consensus”, included budget discipline, a reduction in subsidies, financial liberalisation, and privatisation. The overall aim was to reduce the role of the state and to give markets a bigger role in the economy. These policies proved immensely controversial, especially since balancing the budget often involved cuts to social safety nets, while the abolition of subsidies pushed up food and petrol prices.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

In low- and middle-income countries tariffs fell from around 39 per cent in the early 1980s to 13 per cent by 2000.96 Consumers might be the beneficiaries of the freer movement of goods, but they were certainly not invited to the negotiating table. Worse, free trade put those who saw it as the consumers’ best friend at loggerheads with many activists in the South who felt it ran roughshod over social justice and local development. The momentum for choice was top-down, sponsored by the architects of the neo-liberal ‘Washington Consensus’. Equally interesting was a second, bottom-up dynamic. This was not spearheaded by lawyers, economists and businessmen, nor was it about waving the magic wand of the market in foreign lands. It came from ordinary people who demanded to be heard as users of public services. Today, the welfare state is often mocked as the ‘nanny state’, from which Thatcher and Reagan liberated downtrodden citizens.

P. 578 thrift 57, 117, 142, 239, 264, 277–8, 287, 365, 368, 406 see also austerity; and DIY 261; excessive 487; and the First World War 256, 277–8; and Keynes 285; and the middle class 412, 416; and pocket money 488; and savings 417–19; waste, recycling and 629, 642–3 ‘throwaway society’ 622–75 Tianjin (Tientsin) 179 Tianqiao 190, 191, 685 Tietz (department store) 193, 199 Tigert, John 264 timber 23 time: devoted to pleasant/unpleasant activities during a day 453–5, 454; discretionary 451–2; inequalities of income and 449; leisure time 301, 444–50, 446, 447, 451–2, 460, 469; national time-use surveys 454, 457–8, 458–9; and pace of life 441–3, 470, 471; polarization by class 450–51, 468–9; poverty 403, 441, 443, 451, 460, 469, 477, 483; ‘quality time’ 443, 469–70, 479; rhythm of 474–5; social compact in regard to 481; and technology 465; time saving appliances see domestic appliances and technologies; time saving promises 255–6, 441, 448; working hours see labour and work: working hours Times, The 637 tin cans 216, 638–9, 647 toasters 180, 257, 280, 329, 383, 657 tobacco 21, 26, 53, 58, 65, 77, 78, 88, 141, 153, 168, 203 see also cigarettes; and France 162; in Japan 359; taxes 162; from vending machines 278 Tobin, John 129 Tobler, Theodor 172 Tocqueville, Alexis de 438, 442, 611 toilets 176, 178, 179, 180, 184, 186, 189, 370 Tokyo 165, 359, 383, 536, 685; Chifuren 393; Edo 176, 181, 358, 472; Nakamuraya restaurant 543; Roppongi army base 378; Yutaka Club 513 Tollentina, Livia 34 Tönnies, Ferdinand 581 tools, as consumer goods 261 toothpaste 299, 358, 375, 381 Toronto 203, 270 Total Material Requirement (TMR) 665, 668 totalitarianism 11, 273, 279, 289–96, 314, 680 see also communism; fascism; Nazism; Stalinism; ‘consumerism’ as 5, 7 tourism 291, 292, 327, 511–13, 534, 602–3 see also travel Townsend, Peter 510 toys 30, 59, 138, 342, 385, 485, 486, 487, 488–9, 494, 616; and cognitive development 231; dolls 485, 488, 491, 618; and recycled plastic 635; second-hand 656 Trabant car 331, 335, 337 trade see also commerce: African 129–31; barriers 120, 136, 159, 160, 298, 572, 580; barter 46; branding see branding; British empire and American trade 164–5; cards 192; Chinese 23, 24–6, 44–7, 88, 92; contraband see smuggling; currents 24–5; Dutch 54–5; expansion of global trade, 1500–1800 23–4; fair trade see fair trade; fairs 307, 328; free trade see free trade; and the general good 96; global exchange and the world of goods 23–8, 162; global trading system 162; growth of markets and 23–4, 25, 53, 57, 92–3, 122, 131, 327, 682–3; haggling 190, 204, 209, 210; hawkers 205; herring trade 26; justice 573–7 see also fair trade; and labour specialization/division 24, 54; liberalization 146, 161, 162–3 see also free trade; luxury trades 28, 29, 537 see also silk; spices; monopolies see monopolies; ocean trade 23, 24–6, 88, 120, 124, 167, 357, 683; palm-oil 130; pedlars 203, 205, 359; posts 25; price controls 27; and Renaissance morals 35; retail see retail trade; silver as currency of 25–6; smuggling see smuggling; and sociability 96; spurred by demand 92; street sellers 204; structural view of global trade 573; trans-regional 23; transatlantic see transatlantic consumption and trade; tribute see tribute; vulgarity of shopkeeping 35; wars 26; world merchandise trade in 21st century 683 trade unions 149, 278, 306, 307, 343, 450, 457, 529, 530, 532, 534; Christian unionists 275; and holidays 533, 534; Nazi 290–91; and Sunday 477, 479, 480; and the Taft-Harley Act (1947) 529 trademarks 47, 486 see also branding Traidcraft 577 transatlantic consumption and trade 23, 26–8, 38, 76, 81, 82, 91, 92–3, 122, 128; slave trade see slavery/slaves transfer printing 89 transmigration of souls 105 transport: and the city 175; environmental damage from transportation 683; EU government expenditure on 538; networks/infrastructures 190, 670, 681; railways 609; and ‘smart’ technologies 686 Trauberg, Leonid 292 travel 282, 301, 511–12 see also tourism; and airbnb 655; carbon footprint 675; charter flights 301, 533; as collective endeavour 528–9; commuters and travel to work 14, 200, 340, 454, 457, 685, 686; on company transport 528–9; culture 292; and the elderly 509, 511–15; and the flow of foreign tastes 602–3; in France for shopping, eating and hobbies 685; and ICT 687; for shopping in France 685; Workers Travel Association 533–4 tribute 24, 44, 79, 123, 131, 138–9; tax 131 Trinidad 582 tropical goods 162–3 see also coffee; spices; sugar; tea; colonialism and tropical production 78–9, 80, 90, 91, 162–3 Trotsky, Leon 277, 288 Troy, Patrick 670 Truman, Harry S. 504 Tschirnhaus, Ehrenfried von 88 Tsirk (Circus) 293 Tucson 662 Tupperware parties 341 Turin, ‘Salon of Taste’ 470 Turkey 12, 78, 618, 619, 620, 644 Turkish carpets 23, 30, 32, 96 Turlington, Robert 69 Tuscany 29, 30 Twitter 470 UBS 449 Uganda 592, 594 Ulbricht, Walter 328 unemployment 12, 261, 279–80, 344, 407, 429, 431, 614; and bankruptcy 431; benefits 433, 508, 538; mass 287; and waste 634 Union des Consommateurs de Gaz Parisien 183 Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW) 480 United African Company 133 United Kingdom see Britain and the United Kingdom United Nations: consumer protection 552–3; Food and Agriculture Organization 573 United States of America: advertising 318, 318, 319, 494–5; American Civil War 122, 638; the American dream 237–8, 283, 340; American remittances to Britain 590; American way of life 9, 543, 679 see also Americanization; Americanization see Americanization; amusement parks 219; anti-Puritanism 450; armed forces 543; auto-repair shops 659; bankruptcy 431–2, 433; Bill of Rights (1962) 387; British empire and American trade 164–5; buyers’ leagues 156; cars 279, 281, 428, 658; Catholic and Protestant teenage beliefs 613; child-centred marketing and advertising 485; children watching television 489; Children’s Charter (1929) 487; Chinese relations 128, 299; church attendance 608; churches offering social and community services 612; civil rights activism 324–5; and cocoa 164; and coffee 92, 165, 173, 566; Cold War see Cold War; and collecting 227; comfort trade-offs 61; communitysupported agriculture 580, 588; company-based recreation 525, 526, 527–8, 529–31; company services 524–5, 526, 527–8; computer sales 674; Consumer Product Safety Commission 553; consumer rights and protection 550–51, 552–3; as consumer society model 10, 273, 307; consumption and freedom in self-image of 289; cotton 67; credit 302, 409, 410–12, 414, 415, 423–4, 426, 428–9, 430, 433; debt, personal 426, 433; defence spending 542; Department of Commerce 319; department stores 199, 202, 205, 342, 424, 486; and the Depression 279, 280–83, 288; domestic technologies 180, 247, 250, 259–60; elderly people 498–9, 500–502, 503–5, 507, 508, 511–12, 514, 517; elite 228; energy sources, demands and consumption 325, 671–3; Environmental Protection Agency 662; European views of affluence as an American invasion 305–6; evangelical revival 608–9; export of consumer lifestyle 307; fair trade 562, 564, 566, 578–9; families and generational bonds 520, 521; families without bank accounts 432; farmers 203; Federal Housing Administration 286, 341, 413; Federal Reserve Board ‘Survey of Consumer Finances for 2007’ 430; Federal Trade Commission 414, 553; films made in 211, 307, 328, 347; and freedom of choice 5, 288–9, 553, 556–7; French views of American culture 305, 306; gated communities 392; and the global spread of material civilization 11; healthcare 556–7; Hollywood 211, 348, 351; and the home 223, 236, 239, 240, 242, 244, 244, 245, 246–7, 248, 259, 262–3, 428, 435; household debt 409, 425; immigrants 1860–1920 598; imperialism 322, 618–19; income share of the rich 436, 437; industrial revolution 161; industrial worker hours 216; inegalitarian luxury as norm 438; and Israel 619; Italian migrant diets in 598–9, 602; Jews and commercialization 615; Korean War 307, 504; laundry 673; leisure gap between Americans and Europeans 449–52, 456; leisure hours 446, 447, 452; luxury goods spending by millionaires 439; as a ‘market empire’ 307; marketing courses 319; Marshall Plan 272; material civilization 237; mega-churches 610, 611–12; Mexican immigrants 588–9, 590, 591; middle class 412, 431; misery U-index 454; motoring cult 544; municipal waste 622; national conference on the aging (1950–51) 504; National Recovery Administration 286; National School Lunch Program 543–4; New Deal 274, 285, 286–7, 288, 389, 413, 524, 529, 543; New York see New York; old people’s homes 505; Older American Act 501; organic food 581; outsourcing environmental burden 669; overindebtedness 431–2; playgrounds 219; poor children 490–91; post-war occupation of Japan 378; products in 2009 in-use, in storage and at end-of-life 663; public services 450; racism 136; radio 264, 266; rag trade 628; reading habits 354; Reagan administration 544, 553; recorded music industry 685; recycling 635, 640, 652; religion’s use of commercial culture in 607–13; religious beliefs 610, 613; rent 239, 242, 244; repair services 659; retirement for leisure reasons 450, 500; savings 305, 342, 418, 420, 421, 422; in-school advertising and branded give-aways 485; sewage 179; shopping 371; show house exhibitions abroad 307, 329; smartphones 464; social spending 304, 305, 539–40, 541, 542; spectator sport boom 463; standard of living 149, 150, 240, 280–83; state parks 544; storage 661–2, 663; students 281–2, 312, 495, 497, 650; subsidized mortgages 681; suburbanization/suburbs 229–30, 239, 243, 270, 305, 309, 310–11, 340–41, 398; sugar consumption 164; sumptuary laws 63; Sunday deregulation 478; supermarkets 348, 551; Surplus Marketing Administration 543; Taft-Harley Act (1947) 529; Tax Reform Bill (1986) 427; teenagers 312, 613; televangelism 610–11; television watching/sets 454, 455, 489, 673, 674; time spent on different activities 454; toys 489; trade justice and simple living 577; trade unions 450, 529, 530; transformation from scarcity to abundance 287; Vietnam War 322, 542; wages 147, 224, 247, 341–2, 411; war production (WWII) 529; ‘Washington Consensus’ 553; waste 627, 629, 631, 632, 634, 641, 642, 643, 648, 649 see also New York: waste in NYC; water consumption 177, 186–7; water meters 188; water rates 183–4; ‘work hard, play hard’ motto 468; working hours 443–4, 446, 447, 449–50; worries over decline of happiness 305; youth spending power 312 UNSER Land 580 upper classes 63, 192, 292, 347, 436, 466 see also aristocrats/gentry urban living see cities and urban life USDAW (Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers) 480 utility networks 175–6, 180, 181, 183, 188–9, 220, 248, 670, 681 Utrecht 57, 212 Vacances et Santé 534 vacuum cleaners 179, 247, 248, 258, 265, 383, 661 Vacuumland 661 Valentino, Rudolph 282 value: and antiquity 4, 50, 53, 227; and choice 289; consumption/consumer as creator of 3, 151, 233; and cost 151; empire and the value of origin 169–71; exotic goods and the creation of 168–70; of place 161, 167–8, 169–71; power extending to 168–73; Puritan values 118; social benefits of consumption 102–3, 106–10, 118, 155–6; spiritual and material values out of balance 284; of thrift see thrift Vanoni, Ezio 308 Veblen, Thorstein 13, 15, 158, 228, 229, 230, 339, 435–6 Veere 57 velvet 58, 60 Velveta 291 vending machines 278, 370, 528 Venezuela 79, 80, 81, 162 Venice 22, 23, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 36–7, 38, 86 vicarious consumption 228 vicarious leisure 228 vice 98–9 Victor 263 Victoria, Queen 140 Victorians 161, 169, 183, 184–5, 385, 406, 572; and immanentism 609; and leisure 216, 455; pawnshops 408 Vienna 72, 243, 275, 310, 549–50, 632 Vietnam 653, 670; War 322, 542 Vietor, J.


pages: 497 words: 161,742

The Enemy Within by Seumas Milne

active measures, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, corporate governance, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, Etonian, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, union organizing, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, éminence grise

In Britain, privatization, City and corporate deregulation, low taxes on the wealthy and labour flexibility became the order of the day – both under John Major and, with modifications, Tony Blair. With trade unions on their knees, wages stagnated and job insecurity spread, as profits and boardroom pay ballooned. Globally, the ‘free market’ Washington Consensus was barely contested throughout the 1990s. The financial crash of 2008 and the epochal economic crisis it triggered discredited that orthodoxy, which was seen to have failed in the most spectacular and destructive fashion. A model of capitalism that Thatcher had borrowed from the Chilean dictator General Pinochet – and, along with Ronald Reagan, came to symbolize – was only rescued from collapse by the largest state intervention in history.


pages: 614 words: 174,226

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

., “Do Countries Compete over Corporate Tax Rates?,” Journal of Public Economics 92, no. 5 (June 2008): 1210–35. 57. The first systematic study of the effects of free capital flows on financial stability, published in 1998, was co-authored by John Williamson, an economist best known for coining the term “Washington consensus” in 1989 to describe the set of free-market policies that the United States regularly prescribed for developing nations with economic problems. Williamson pointedly omitted free capital flows from his original list; he and some other leading development economists never embraced the idea. Jagdish Bhagwati, one of the profession’s most forceful and uncompromising advocates of free trade, is another longtime opponent of the free movement of capital.


Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition by Kindleberger, Charles P., Robert Z., Aliber

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, death of newspapers, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, edge city, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Hyman Minsky, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, junk bonds, large denomination, law of one price, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, railway mania, Richard Thaler, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, very high income, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

In fact, he considered clinging to rigid beliefs in the face of disconcerting evidence to be one of the more dangerous forms of irrationality, especially when it is practiced by those in charge. The international economy would be a safer place if CPK’s tolerant skepticism were more common among the powers that be. I am thinking, in particular, about current discussions of the so-called ‘Washington consensus’, and the pros and cons of both freely floating exchange rates and unfettered capital markets. Any reader of this book will come away with the distinct notion that large quantities of liquid capital sloshing around the world should raise the possibility that they will overflow the container.


Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy by Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson

Andrei Shleifer, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, declining real wages, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, minimum wage unemployment, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, rent-seeking, seminal paper, strikebreaker, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, William of Occam, women in the workforce

C. (1998) Bismarck and Germany, 1862–1892, 2nd edition; New York: Longman. Williamson, Jeffrey G. (1985) Did British Capitalism Breed Inequality? Boston: Allen and Unwin. Williamson, Jeffrey G. (1999) “Real Wages, Inequality and Globalization in Latin America before 1940,” Revista de Historia Economica, 17, 101–42. Williamson, John (1993) “Democracy and the Washington Consensus,” World Development, 21, 1329–36. Williamson, Oliver E. (1985) The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, Relational Contracting; New York: Free Press. Wintrobe, Ronald (1998) The Political Economy of Dictatorship; New York: Cambridge University Press. Wittman, Donald (1983) “Candidate Motivation: A Synthesis of Alternative Theories,” American Political Science Review, 77, 142–57.


pages: 691 words: 203,236

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

Ideologically, the fall of the Berlin Wall gave rise to an optimistic ‘End of History’ spirit among American neoconservatives and interventionist liberals, symbolized by Francis Fukuyama’s iconic book of 1992.40 With communism defeated, liberalism, capitalism and democracy, under American tutelage, could finally become universal. A global framework based on the Pax Americana and the shared values of the ‘Washington Consensus’ would revolutionize humanity. Here was a classic form of liberal-democratic missionary nationalism in keeping with the country’s ‘City on a Hill’ traditions. Some neoconservatives advocated the use of American military power to accelerate the regime changes needed to spread democracy. Then, on 11 September 2001, jihadi attacks destroyed the Twin Towers.


pages: 723 words: 211,892

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Joan Didion, land reform, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, Ronald Reagan, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, yellow journalism, young professional

Kennedy seemed to favor Khrushchev’s proposal, but the hawks in the room wanted to ignore the new Soviet offer and attack Cuba. That position gained momentum when in the middle of the meeting word came that a US reconnaissance plane had been shot down over eastern Cuba, its pilot killed. The shooting amplified the calls for war. The Washington consensus now seemed to be that if Cuba continued to fire on American planes, the United States would have to retaliate by taking out all the surface-to-air missile sites. Everyone in the room knew that once that happened, events would accelerate quickly, leading to an invasion of Cuba and a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.22 President Kennedy did not want that invasion or that war.


pages: 736 words: 233,366

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Living standards often suffered in the early years, though economic growth saw them start to improve significantly during the later 1990s. The path adopted (with numerous variants) in the process of fundamental economic restructuring followed neo-liberal theories that by now had almost entirely displaced Keynesianism as orthodoxy. A programme, dubbed ‘the Washington Consensus’, originally devised in 1989 for Latin American countries, was widely deemed to be the way forward in the formidable task of transforming the moribund state-owned economies of Eastern and Central European countries. It gave outright priority to fast liberalization of the economy through deregulation, privatization, and opening up to the freedom of the market.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

I would argue this framework of “the political” as articulated by Schmitt and developed by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, for example, is a stale and ineffective strategy for understanding the logics of power and design in our age of ecological precarity. Put differently, only a fool would tell you that the functional definition of the “post-political” looks like the Washington Consensus. As should be clear to the attentive reader, my rehearsal of Schmitt's model in this chapter is in order to overwhelm it with catastrophic contradictions. 11.  See also Stuart Elden's work on the history of the concept of territory, especially The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), as well as Elden, “Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power,” Political Geography 34 (May 2013): 35–51; Elden, “The Geopolitics of King Lear: Territory, Land, Earth,“ in Law and Literature, 25: 2 (2013); and Elden, “Chamayou's Manhunts: From Territory to Space?”


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Undemocratic leaders had plenty to gain from the loans (which supported extravagant lifestyles and loyalist coteries), the privatization (which offered opportunities for bribes and self-dealing), and the reforms themselves (which shifted the economic surplus in their favor). They could also afford plenty of American weapons, which helped make it possible for the regimes to protect themselves by attacking their own working classes. As capital concentrated in fewer hands, it grew easier to get everyone on this same page, a page later named the Washington Consensus. To wrest American trade policy from democratic control, capitalists pushed “free trade,” which meant moving authority for agreements to the executive branch and using tariffs to undermine foreign support for their industries. But with the exception of extremely high-growth Japan, this created a familiar problem in capitalist South and East Asia.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

Several authors contend that the erosion of the real minimum wage accounts for much of the increase of inequality as represented by the ratio of incomes in the tenth percentile to those in the ninetieth percentile.17 It seems plausible that the decline of relative incomes below the ninetieth percentile since the late 1970s has been caused, at least in part, by the declining bargaining power and density of unions, by the increased importance of imports and immigration, by the inroads of automation, and by the decrease in the real minimum wage. Frank Levy and Peter Temin provide a complementary interpretation that places more emphasis on a change in political philosophy from what they call the “Detroit Consensus” of the late 1940s to the Reagan-initiated “Washington Consensus” of the early 1980s. The main point that Levy and Temin add to our preceding summary is that highly progressive taxes, with 90 percent marginal tax rates for top-bracket earners in the 1940s and 1950s, sent a signal that high incomes were unacceptable.18 Beginning with the Reagan tax cuts, that element of the policy support of the great compression began to erode, and CEO compensation surged ahead from twenty times average worker pay in 1973 to 257 times higher in 2013, when the average CEO pay of publicly traded companies reached $10.5 million.19 The pay gap is even greater for retirement saving, in which it is typical for departing CEOs to receive multi-million-dollar retirement plans.