In December 1997, the IMF offered Korea loans. In return, Korea had to undergo radical neoliberal restructuring. Since 1997, growth has slowed, poverty and inequality have risen, investment spending has stagnated, and foreign ownership of Korean firms and banks has skyrocketed. We argue that the...

The paper argues that global Neoliberalism creates both chronic sluggish aggregate demand growth and chronic excess aggregate supply, and that these tendencies reinforce one another in a vicious circle. Stagnant global demand has unleashed destructive competition in core global markets, creating...

Korea's state-led, bank-based, and closed financial system helped generate its impressive development record from 1961 until the 1997 crisis. However, an ill-conceived liberalization process in the early 1990s eventuated in an IMF takeover in late 1997. Post-crisis neoliberal restructuring,...

As late as October 1997 the IMF declared that the Korean economy was experiencing a temporary liquidity squeeze, not a solvency crisis. Yet in December 1997 Deputy Managing Director Stanley Fischer declared that Korea suffered from a systemic “breakdown of economic relations†so...

This paper introduces a Marx-Keynes-Kalecki model of the political economy of comparative central banking which suggests that monetary policy is determined by four key factors: capital-labor relations; industry-finance relations; the degree of central bank independence; and the position of the...

In response to the financial crisis of 2007-20I0, governments in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere have invested billions of dollars in financial institutions to prevent them from going bankrupt and from further disrupting the global economy. Despite these massive public bail-outs, a...