Rapidly rising deficits at both the federal and state and local government levels, along with long-term financing problems in the Social Security and Medicare programs, have triggered a one-sided austerity-focused class war in the US. Similar class conflicts have broken out around the globe. A...

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

In December 1997 the IMF offered Korea loans to help alleviate its financial crisis. These loans were accompanied by what the IMF called “extreme structural conditionality.” Korea was required to replace its traditional East Asian economic system with a neoliberal model. We review economic...

In 1997 former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volker posed a question about the commercial banking system he said he could not answer. The industry was under more intense competitive pressure than at any time in living memory, Volcker noted, “yet at the same time the industry never has...

This paper evaluates the neoliberal economic restructuring process implemented in Korea following the 1997 Asian financial crisis. We first argue that the austerity macroeconomic policy of late 1997 and early 1998 was the main cause of the economic collapse in 1998, and that the decision of the...

We recently experienced a global financial crisis so severe that only massive rescue operations by governments around the world prevented a total financial market meltdown and perhaps another global Great Depression. One necessary precondition for the crisis was the perverse, bonus-driven...

The main thesis of this paper is that the ultimate cause of the current global financial crisis is to be found in the deeply flawed institutions and practices of what is often referred to as the New Financial Architecture (NFA) – a globally integrated system of giant bank conglomerates and the...

Many countries in the developing world have adopted an approach to monetary policy that focuses on maintaining a low level of inflation, to the exclusion of other important objectives such as employment generation, increasing investment or reducing poverty, despite the widespread evidence that...

The South African Reserve Bank and Ministry of Finance have adopted inflation targeting and the gradual relaxation of exchange controls (along with control of public spending and financial liberalization) as the foundation of their economic policy in an attempt to win the confidence of foreign...

This paper presents the first set of estimates of the rentier share of income for twenty-nine OECD countries. We define rentier share to mean the income accruing to financial institutions and the holders of financial assets. The years of coverage vary by country, but span the period 1960-2000....