financial market

How Goldman gambled on starvation

By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You’re wrong. There’s more. It turns out that the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here’s the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world – Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more – have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world. Read (...) read

Financialisation and Financial Actors in Agriculture Commodity Markets

Financing Food focuses on how derivative markets work and on speculation in food and agricultural products. This study demonstrates how the futures market for agricultural products, in particular, has changed and is being disrupted by new speculators, growing index funds and commodities funds. Read more read

"Subprime Carbon?": Friends of the Earth attacks carbon-trading markets

The world’s carbon trading markets growing complexity threatens another "sub-prime" style financial crisis that could again destabilise the global economy, campaigners warn today. In a new report, Friends of the Earth says that to date "cap and trade" carbon markets have done almost nothing to reduce emissions but have been plagued by inefficiency and corruption that render them unfit for purpose. Read (...) read

Financial Secrecy Index: Shining light into dark places

Secrecy is a central feature of the global financial system. Jurisdictions compete with each other to provide it, in order to attract financial flows – with appalling effects elsewhere. It is essential to identify the worst culprits in providing this secrecy. But nobody has ever tried to do this in a systematic, objective way – until now. The Financial Secrecy Index (FSI) creates a ranking which identifies the jurisdictions that are most aggressive in providing secrecy in international (...) read

The Movement Against the Banks

A massive rally in Chicago next week aims to express public displeasure with the massive bank bailout outside the American Bank Association annual meeting. Protesters will converge at 11:30 on Monday, October 26, at 301 North Water Street, where the meeting is taking place. "The same financial institutions that caused the economic crisis and took billions in taxpayer bailouts are back to earning incredible profits," rally organizers—including Public Citizen, the AFL-CIO, and Change to (...) read

Meltdown Not the Only Crisis in the World

Muhammad Yunus, who claimed the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize founding Grameen Bank, which has lent out more than six billion dollars to mostly poor women, says the global recession presents a historical opportunity for change. Catherine Makino, IPS Correspondent, Interviews MD. YUNUS, Bangladeshi banker and economist Read read

Toxic capitalism

http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip (...)

The crisis that we are witnessing today is shaking the very foundations of neo-liberal capitalism. It is unfolding at an accelerating speed, and nobody is capable of saying where it will lead. This article does not try to follow its unfolding step by step, because it would be likely to be outdated by the time it was published. It seeks rather to suggest some keys to interpret this crisis and to demonstrate what is at stake on the social level.  read

The Financial Crisis of 2008

> Interviewed by Simone Bruno

I would like to talk about the current crisis. How is it that so many people could see it coming, but the people in charge of governments and economies didn’t, or didn’t prepare? The basis for the crisis is predictable and it was in fact predicted. It is built into financial liberalization that there will be frequent and deep crises. In fact, since financial liberalization was instituted about thirty five years ago, there has been a trend of increasing regularity of crises and deeper crises, (...) read

Developing countries face hard times as US recession looms

> by Martin Khor

It is a terrible time for the global economy. The latest sign of this is the deep plunge in the Asian and European stock markets on Monday, 21 January in response to the string of bad news last week in the United States, leading to the conclusion that the US has now slipped into recession. Read more read

Tribunal finds undue influence of bank on India’s national polices

New Delhi: The four day Independent Peoples Tribunal (IPT) on the World Bank in India concluded here today hearing numerous depositions indicting the Bank’s policy and project interventions in India. While the World Bank India office did engage with the IPT and claimed they would make a deposition to respond to some of the evidence against the Bank,they failed to show up despite provision of adequate space and time by the organisers. In its preliminary findings, the IPT observed the Bank (...) read