What happened?
“Robodebt” is the label applied to an Australian government initiative starting in 2016 designed to increase recoveries of “overpayments” made to social security recipients, retrospectively dating back to 2010. The original objective was to recover $1.7 billion over [...]
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Over the past thirty years or so, global financial market integration and financial (re)regulation have largely contributed to the increased vulnerability of Developing and Emerging Capitalist Countries (DECC) to the volatile cross-border movement of money and capital. Repeated financial [...]
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In the lead-up to today’s pre-election Commonwealth budget, much has been written about the need to quickly eliminate the government’s deficit, and reduce its accumulated debt. The standard shibboleths are invoked liberally: government must face hard truths and learn to live within [...]
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Though Marx never developed a theory of the capitalisation of the state or of money creation, he did notice this relationship of getting something for nothing (that we discussed in Part 1 of this post) in the first volume of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy:
The state [...]
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The esteemed science fiction writer and Professor of Biochemistry at Boston University, Isaac Asimov once said that the most interesting phrase to hear in science is not ‘Eureka! I’ve found it’, but ‘gee, that’s funny.’ It turns out that the ‘gee, that’s funny’ moments are the most exciting [...]
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The following post is based on a longer review of the book to be published in September 2016 issue of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.
If you were to enter a cryogenic sleep in 2008, wake up in early 2016 and take a quick glance at the fortunes of Western capitalism, you [...]
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The Making of the Modern “Debt State”: What We Know (and Don’t Know) About Ownership of the Public Debt
In a previous contribution to SPERI Comment, I presented some of my research on the domestic ownership structure of the US federal debt. The findings showed that since the [...]
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With the news that Susanne Soederberg has been awarded the 2015 British International Studies Association International Political Economy Group Book Prize, we are re-posting this feature on her book. There is also a short trailer on Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry, available [...]
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