Prabhat Patnaik | The French economist J B Say had believed that there could never be a problem of aggregate demand in any economy, that whatever was produced was ipso facto demanded.

There’s been Abenomics in Japan; Modinomics in India and Bidenomics in the US. Now we have Securonomics in Britain. This is slick terminology for the basics of the UK’s new Labour government’s economic policy – as expounded by its new finance minister (quaintly called the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain), Rachel Reeves a former Bank of England economist.

Jacobin | Finance’s dominance over the economy isn’t a deviant evolution of a “good” industrial capitalism. Finance and industry are interdependent — meaning solving problems like inequality and climate change will require a far-reaching democratization of the economy.

Prabhat Patnaik | There are well-known problems associated with the concept of gross domestic product as well as with its measurement.

Western economists continue to argue that the Chinese economy is heading down the drain. As Michael Roberts argues, this critique is not factually correct, and it aims to distract attention from the reality that the Western capitalist economies (apart from the United States) are floundering in stagnation and near slump.

People's World | The views of Cuban leaders on problems now enveloping the country shed light on the realities of a nation under siege and a revolution in trouble. The information is pertinent to the solidarity efforts of Cuba’s friends abroad.

Monthly Review | Matteo Crossa reveals the true nature of unequal value transfer from Mexico to the United States. Going beyond a simple tally of wages lost versus remittances, Crossa’s research demonstrates the true magnitude of the value stolen from Mexico, negating the claim that its manufacturing sector is a boon to the Mexican working class.

Economic researchers at the Institut de Recherches Économiques et Sociales in France indicate that global commodity chains have three different elements: (1) a production element linking parts and commodities in complex production chains; (2) a value element, which focuses on their role as “value chains,” transferring value between and within firms globally; and (3) a monopoly element, reflecting the fact that such commodity chains are controlled by the centralized financial headquarters of monopolistic multinational corporations and garner massive monopoly rents, as theorized by Stephen Hymer in the 1970s.

Michael Roberts Blog | Mainstream economics cannot deliver even on its own terms because it makes two basic assumptions that are not based on reality; one in so-called ‘microeconomics’ and one in so-called ‘macroeconomics’. As a result, mainstream falls down as a scientific analysis of modern (capitalist) economies.

Decades of neoliberal political narratives have attempted to convince us that the only reason for public ownership is to subsidize private capital growth. Neoliberal economics are focused on the transfer of wealth from the public to private capital through commodification of public assets and services. The result has been a society tilted in favour of profit generation through public subsidies of infrastructure and services over human need.

Neither Marx nor Engels ever argued any more than Marxists today believe that capitalism will collapse “automatically” or transform itself into some less exploitative form. Capitalism has always shown a remarkable ability to accommodate challenges, albeit always at the expense of working people.

A classic refrain below. The alternative is that the government can actually make things and not wait for private markets to figure it out and even then it is not operating like a capitalist enterprise.

For example, when government spends money on basic research, it typically doesn’t capture the monetary value that research creates. But the eventual economic benefits, which are reaped by companies downstream of government-funded research, tend to vastly outweigh the cost. The government doesn’t need to be the one who gets paid, as long as society gets paid. The same is often true of environmental cleanup, road networks and anything with a positive externality.

With just two days to go, all the public opinion polls indicate that Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden is going to win the US presidential election and oust incumbent Donald Trump.

The cheerleaders of neoliberal policy are rising like zombies after the current collection of economic, health, climate, and political crises seemed to bury them for a while. This means that it is not going to be enough to just defend the current wreck, but build something better. Socialists have social and economic policy programs that deal directly with these challenges. It is time to dust them off and fight for them with abandon.

Marx opposed both these mainstream theories. The quantity theory of money was opposed by Marx for two reasons: 1) money is endogenous, created by banks etc, not by state fiat; 2) overall, money represents value in commodity production and is not independent of it.

The Covid-19 crisis will affect the public finances through higher unemployment, reduced tax revenue and substantial government spending on schemes to support the economy. Already there are calls for a return to austerity once the most acute phase of the medical emergency has passed. It can be difficult for citizens to take a position on these debates: many feel that they lack the technical knowledge.

This memo was sent to the Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy Council Office on Friday, April 3, 2020. It attempted to do three things in two pages: 1) encapsulate the problems that were emerging with the design of CERB, at the highest level – one of politics and trust; 2) clarify the technical problems with CERB as currently designed; 3) provide fixes for each of these problems. Its goal was to provide ways to expand coverage and protection to income supports available under CERB, which on that date provided $2,000 a month, for up to 4 months, in emergency income support to those who lose their jobs between March 15, 2020 and October 3, 2020.

COVID-19, the illness caused by coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the second severe acute respiratory syndrome virus since 2002, is now officially a pandemic. As of late March, whole cities are sheltered in…

If all country pandemics were the same, then the figure below would be how this pandemic will come to an end. The start-to-peak ratio of Covid-19 infections for all countries would be 40-50 days. Many countries are not yet near the peak point and there is no guarantee that the peak will at the same time point, if mitigation and suppression methods (testing, self-isolation, quarantine and lockdowns) are not working similarly. But ultimately, there will be a peak everywhere and the pandemic will wane – if only to come back next year, maybe.

According to AFP estimates, some 1.7 billion people across the world are now living under some form of lockdown as a result of the coronavirus. That’s almost a quarter of the world population. The world economy has seen nothing like this.

Nearly all economic forecasts for global GDP in 2020 are for a contraction of 1-3%, as bad if not worse than in the Great Recession of 2008-9. And forecasts for the major economies for this quarter ending this week and the next quarter are coming in at an annualised drop of anything between 20-50%! The economic activity indicators (called PMIs), which are surveys of company views on what they are doing, are recording all-time lows of contraction for March.