Marica Frangakis: Inequality and Financialisation: The Case of the EU

After the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the elimination of the system of fixed exchange rates, global finance made new inroads into the world economy, while the deregulation of financial services marked the beginning of the era of financialisation. Inequality in the distribution of income and wealth feeds the process of financialisation and is fed by it. It is a two-way relationship, which has favoured the meteoric rise of the More

Lutz Brangsch: The “Hard Core” of European Integration

Dimitris Sotiropoulos notes quite rightly that the Euro is not just a currency, but a mechanism: “It has set up a particular form of symbiosis among different capitalist economies” (Sotiropoulos 2012, 66). But what is the material nature of this “symbiosis among different capitalist economies”?

This key issue had already been raised by John Grahl in 2003. He stressed that globalisation and the associated process of European integration More

Peter Gowan: Crisis in the Heartland. Consequences of the New Wall Street System

The long credit crunch that began in the Atlantic world in August 2007 is strange in its extraordinary scope and intensity. Mainstream discourse, referring to a ‘sub-prime’ crisis, implies that the credit crunch has been caused, rather than triggered, by a bubble in the real economy. This is at best naïve: after all, the bursting of an equally large bubble in the Spanish housing market led to no such blow-out in the domestic banking system More

Peter Gowan: Economics and Politics within the Capitalist Core and the Debate on the New Imperialism.

In the lively new debate on what has come to be called the New Imperialism one focal point is the extent to which there are structural sources of conflict between the main centres in the capitalist core and if there are, whether these currently take the form of inter-state rivalry. Perhaps the two strongest poles in this debate amongst authors with a connection to Marxism are Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin on one side and Giovanni Arrighi on the other. More