money

18 Février2018 Valérie Bugault nous propose une série de deux articles en écho à l’interview de Xavier Moreau  publiée récemment sur le site des Non Alignés. Dans...

By Peter Koenig 27.12.2017 The other day I was in a shopping mall looking for an ATM to get some cash. There was no ATM. A...

Jan 26, 2018 Boosters of blockchain technology compare its early days to the early days of the Internet. But whereas the Internet quickly gave rise...

Anti-imperialist Alliance Tobias Pfennig Today I would like to speak about “The failure of the soviet economy and the global domination of the petrodollar”. While we...

The unprecedented collusion between governments and central banks that occurred in 2008 led to bailouts, zero percent interest rates and quantitative easing on a scale never before seen in history. Those decisions, which were made under duress and in closed-door meetings, set the stage for this inevitable demise of paper money.

[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.

Perhaps it's not surprising that Scandinavians are leading the way toward a future devoid of financial privacy. The region's inhabitants are stereotyped as submissive to governmental whims—to the point of "benign totalitarianism," as a British writer described Swedish political norms. That's a bit unfair, given free market reforms in Denmark and Sweden that make the private sectors in those countries rather robust. But Scandinavians do seem to have more faith in their rulers, and less experience with truly hideous regimes, then some of their neighbors.

'Cashless society' is a euphemism for the "ask-your-banks-for-permission-to-pay society". Rather than an exchange occurring directly between the hotel and me, it takes the form of a "have your people talk to my people" affair. Various intermediaries message one another to arrange an exchange between our respective banks. That may be a convenient option, but in a cashless society it would no longer be an option at all. You'd have no choice but to conform to the intermediaries' automated bureaucracy, giving them a lot of power, and a lot of data about the microtexture of your economic life

Several central banks, including the Bank of England, the People’s Bank of China, the Bank of Canada and the Federal Reserve, are exploring the concept of issuing their own digital currencies, using the blockchain technology developed for Bitcoin. Skeptical commentators suspect that their primary goal is to eliminate cash, setting us up for negative interest rates

by Wolfgang Streeck To understand the conflicts that have erupted in and around the Eurozone over the past five years, it may be helpful to...