It pays not to stare too long at the Credit Default Swap system, in case your brain melts and your eyebrows fall off into your lap. This issue, the Occupied Times is going to dip a careful toe into the maelstrom; next issue we’ll look closer at the darker secrets […]
The fault lines within modern capitalism are widening. What once seemed tiny fissures, barely visible to the Western eye, have now become deep chasms threatening to engulf entire nations. Between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the rise of the financial crisis in September 2008, capitalism’s […]
Nick Pickles, head of the pressure group Big Brother Watch, counts the cost of the UK’s surveillance cameras. Back in 2010, Big Brother Watch conducted the first study of the true cost burden of CCTV to local councils in the United Kingdom. The 342 local councils who disclosed figures had […]
There are some economists who believe that total demand in an economy must equal its total supply. The argument goes something like this: When people sell their produce, they must, almost by definition, receive enough money to buy the equivalent value of other people’s goods. Or to put it another […]
These days, if you sit down to watch the news, you’re almost guaranteed to hear someone talk about ‘the market’. ‘The markets are down today’, they’ll say, or ‘the market won’t like that’. More and more frequently it’s that ‘the markets demand action’, as the threat of recession looms. In […]
Suppose someone were to describe a small country that provided free education through university for all of its citizens, transportation for school children, and free health care – including heart surgery – for all. You might suspect that such a country is either phenomenally rich or on the fast track […]
I have named the way wealth moves in our society as The Lottery Principle. In this system the poor create the rich: a tiny number of winners, with huge payoffs, are entirely funded by the slight impoverishment of the vast majority. This Lottery Principle is a useful summary of what […]
In September of next year, thousands of young people from across England will follow in the footsteps of their older siblings and previous generations by moving out of home and starting university courses. The yearly student exodus has for decades been a familiar calendar event, but 2012 will mark a […]
The Occupy movement was borne largely out of a sense of frustration and anger at the fact that those at the top of the pile, whose out-of-control behaviour cost the global economy trillions and caused incalculable suffering around the world, are getting away with it. Many have questioned why it […]
When the global financial crisis started with the collapse of the sub prime mortgage market in the spring of 2007, it became clear that the world economy was facing a severe downturn and that unemployment would rise. At that time, my husband, the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, remarked that there […]