Walden Bello - Capitalisms Last Stand?: Deglobalization in the Age of Austerity

Capitalisms Last Stand?: Deglobalization in the Age of Austerity — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Capitalisms Last Stand?: Deglobalization in the Age of Austerity" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...59

About the Author

WALDEN BELLO is a member of the House of Representatives of the Republic of the Philippines. He is currently also an adjunct professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton and at St Marys University in Halifax, Canada; he has also been professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines. He was founding director of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South and the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First) in Oakland, California. He is the author or co-author of seventeen books, including Dilemmas of Domination: the Unraveling of the American Empire (London: Zed Books, 2006) and Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy (London: Zed Books, 2004). He obtained his Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University.

CAPITALISMS LAST STAND?

Deglobalization in the Age of Austerity

WALDEN BELLO

Zed Books
LONDON & NEW YORK

For my colleagues and dear friends in Akbayan
and Focus on the Global South

Capitalisms Last Stand? Deglobalization in the Age of Austerity was first published in 2013 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London N1 9JF, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA

This ebook edition was first published in 2013

www.zedbooks.co.uk

Walden Bello 2013

The right of Walden Bello to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

Designed and typeset in ITC Bodoni Twelve by illuminati, Grosmont

Index by John Barker

Cover design: www.roguefour.co.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available

ISBN 978 1 78032 048 9

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION Globalizations Debacle:
Crisis and Opportunity

CONCLUSION Deglobalization:
An Idea Whose Time Has Come?

INTRODUCTION

GLOBALIZATIONS DEBACLE:
CRISIS AND OPPORTUNITY

The economic freefall of the last few years has brought tremendous economic misery to millions. It has also exposed the failure of traditional economic approaches to come up with a solution. Both neoliberalism, which brought on the crisis, and Keynesianism, which was the initial response to it, failed to bring Europe and the United States out of the doldrums. Thus the hunger for innovative solutions, along with a demand for alternative explanations for the emergence of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Peoples concerns were not limited to growth and jobs, but to more fundamental questions like what brought about the crisis and how could the economy be better organized to meet the needs of people and the environment. It is in this context that the mainstream began to show interest in what it once regarded as a fringe idea when we first explored it in the book Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy, published by Zed a decade ago. Attributing the term deglobalization to the author, TheEconomist noted that, contrary to the accepted dictum that globalization was irreversible, the integration of the world economy is in retreat on almost every front.

Deglobalizations entering the mainstream of economic and political debate has compelled me to clarify what it means, how I have employed the paradigm in my efforts to understand various aspects of the contemporary economic crisis, and what it may offer in the way of bringing about a transformation of social and economic relations towards more equality, justice, and sustainability. Deglobalization, in my view, offers a way out of the crisis, though perhaps not the only way.

This volume brings together essays written over the last six years, a period that saw the unraveling of globalization, the financial implosion, and a plunge into deep recession in the United States and Europe. Written in response to fast-moving developments, the articles appear here largely as they were originally published, with a few explanatory comments to place them in context. While some figures may need some adjustment, the analysis in these pieces retain, in the authors view, their validity and urgency.

The purpose of this introductory essay is to guide the reader in navigating this volume. It discusses, sums up, and attempts to further clarify the ideas presented in the three parts into which this book is divided. In , the essays discuss the different perspectives which analysts have used in their effort to understand the crisis of globalization and the alternatives to current social and economic arrangements proposed by these paradigms.

The destructive dynamics of finance capital

For those from Southeast Asia, like me, the financial collapse in New York and Europe in 2008 probably came as less of a surprise than to people in these places. I still remember the swift unraveling of economic life in Bangkok, the ground zero of the crisis, when, taking advantage of the collapse of the real-estate sector owing to overinvestment, speculators hit the baht and forced its value to spiral from 25 to 55 baht to the dollar. In the brief span of a few weeks in the summer of 1997, over $100 billion left the East Asian economies in probably the biggest financial panic until then, bringing Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea to an economic standstill and dragging 22 million Indonesians and 1 million Thais under the poverty line.

Just as Asians should have worried that the financial crises that had hit global markets since the liberalization of capital markets in the early 1980s might one day engulf them, the Asian financial crisis should have been seen, as in the rest of the world, as a portent of things to come, but apparently the only ones to learn from it were Asian governments, which began to stockpile their dollar reserves, largely earned from their exports, to ward off future attacks on their currencies by speculators. In contrast, in the worlds leading economy, by the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century the key reforms to ensure financial stability that had been put in place during the Great Depression, including the landmark GlassSteagall Act, which built a Chinese wall between investment

Why had finance become so central in the global economy? Why did credit, in the form of subprime bank loans and credit cards, become so prominent a feature of global capitalisms leading economy in the last two decades? Why did speculative activity that saw staid investment vehicles like stocks and bonds mutate into all sorts of esoteric financial instruments, like derivatives and collateralized debt obligations, become the driving force of the capitalist economy? One financial corporation chief writing in the Financial Times claimed that there has been an increasing disconnection between the real and financial economies in the past few years. The real economy has grown but nothing like that of the financial economy, which grew even more rapidly until it imploded.

The rise of the finance-driven economy

But was there really a disconnect between the real economy and the financial economy? Or did the financial economy explode to make up for the stagnation of the real economy?

Next page

1234567...59

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Capitalisms Last Stand?: Deglobalization in the Age of Austerity»

Look at similar books to Capitalisms Last Stand?: Deglobalization in the Age of Austerity. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Charles Derber

Greed to Green: Solving Climate Change and Remaking the Economy

Chen Yulu

Chinese Currency and the Global Economy: The Rise of the Renminbi

Walden Bello

Dilemmas of Domination: The Unmaking of the American Empire

Richard D. Wolff

Capitalisms Crisis Deepens: Essays on the Global Economic Meltdown

Briggs

China, the USA and Capitalisms Last Crusade: When Survival is All That Matters

Wolff

Capitalisms crisis deepens: essays on the global economic meltdown 2010-2014

Dunn

The Political Economy of Global Capitalism and Crisis

Bello Andrés

The selected writings of Andrés Bello

Walden Bello

Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash

James R. Gorrie

The China crisis how Chinas economic collapse will lead to a global depression

Bello Walden F.

Asias new battlefield : the USA, China and the struggle for the Western Pacific

Yanis Varoufakis

The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

Discussion, reviews of the book Capitalisms Last Stand?: Deglobalization in the Age of Austerity and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.