Oil, Debt & Power: A New Crisis?
April 4, 2016
An op-ed on the advocacy website Oil Change International examines the high levels of debt within the oil business and the consequences of that debt for extraction. It postulates a dangerous positive feedback mechanism between extraction levels, oil prices and oil company debt. The basic argument is that in order to service their debt, the … Read more
Petrodollars and Profit: Rethinking Political Economy through the Middle East
December 24, 2015
Review by Max Ajl of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bickler’s The Scientist and the Church. Originally published at Jadaliyya Howard Page, a director at what was then Exxon, was once asked, “What would have happened if Iraq production had also surged during the 1960’s,” like that of Saudi Arabia and Iran. He responded, “I admit … Read more
The Renminbi on the World Stage
December 1, 2015
The IMF recently announced that China’s currency, the CYN (Chinese Yuan Renminbi), would be included in the IMF’s basket of currencies, known as the SRD (special drawing rights). The designation comes after China adopted certain reforms in accordance with International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies. The CYN will comprise 11% of the basket, with reductions of … Read more
Is Hollywood running out of risk?
November 30, 2015
Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan Repost from Real-World Economics Review Blog If we are to believe the conventional creed, Hollywood films are highly risky investments. According to De Vany, revenue forecasts have zero precision, which is just a way of saying that ‘anything can happen’. . . . The ‘nobody knows’ principle . . . is revealed in the infinite … Read more
Some Important Limitations of Income Inequality Data
July 11, 2015
Blair Fix, a PhD student in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, points to some important limitations of income inequality data. In a recent posting on capitalaspower.com, Fix shows that, in the case of the U.S., the Top 1% income share correlates not with the share of capitalists in national income (profit … Read more
"The 1% and the Rest of Us" — Tom Mills Interviews Tim Di Muzio
July 3, 2015
Tim DiMuzio is lecturer in International Relations and public policy University of Wollongong in Australia. His book, The 1% and the Rest of Us: A Political Economy of Dominant Ownership, examines the insular lives of the global super rich, the socio-economic system they head, and their restless drive to dominate society and nature. NLP’s Tom … Read more
Performing the Real-Nominal Bifurcation
May 11, 2015
The Globe & Mail recently published a roundup of seven analyses of the Canadian housing sector. All of the analyses took some position on whether or not housing in Canada is “overvalued.” The positions ranged from 60 percent overvalued to seven percent under-valued. Regardless of the position, all of the analyses – at least as … Read more
Patriarchy above the glass ceiling
April 28, 2015
The logic of accumulation is not the only logic that motivates capitalists. As fully actualized human beings, they remain complex in their desires. Rather, the logic of accumulation is dominant and, Nitzan and Bichler argue, pervasive and ascendant; increasingly operating beyond the business domain. However, the other logics, or principles of behaviour, that inform people’s … Read more
Profits and Terror in Argentina in the 1970s
February 21, 2015
New data on the profitability of Argentina’s largest corporations help explain the origins of its last military dictatorship. During Argentina’s military dictatorship of 1976-1983, up to 30,000 people were killed by the armed forces. Figure 1 provides an indication of why. The thick line is a ‘profit margin index’ of the fifty largest private manufacturing … Read more
Differential Taxation: A Convergence of Interests between American Banking and Government
February 13, 2015
Recommended reading by the Transnational Institute (TNI) of Policy Studies: This paper demonstrates that the interests of American banking and government have converged since the early 1980s and relates this trend to modern financial deregulation, revealing a symbiosis that would later influence the global financial crisis of 2007-2008. An examination of corporate profit and taxation … Read more
Stock Buybacks vs Greenfield Investment
December 10, 2014
In his November 29, 2013 piece, ‘Low Capex, High Market Cap: A New High for Corporate Sabotage?’, Edward Lam lends support to CasP’s sabotage thesis by showing how firms with relatively low ‘greenfield’ investment outperform those with relatively high ‘greenfield’ investment. A recent FT article, titled “Money Well Spent?” (Tom Braithwaite, Nicole Bullock and Michael … Read more
The Rise and Fall of Debate in Economics
December 10, 2014
New data illustrate the extent to which economists have stopped discussing each other’s work. Once upon a time, economists regularly used to publicly criticise each other’s work in academic journals. But not any more. In Figure 1 I have illustrated the degree to which economists have stopped debating. The data have been culled from Jstor, the online database of … Read more