Financiarisation de l'économie : cash misère

Özlem Onaran analyses the current problems of secular stagnation from a global perspective. At the core of global economic problems is insufficient demand caused by falling wage shares, because most individual countries, and the world as a whole are “wage-led”. Hence a strategy for global growth is to aim at increasing wages and thus the wage share, and the abandonment of policies focusing purely on national competitiveness. Financialization has broken the link between corporate profitability and investment. Reregulation of finance and higher public investment is required in order to crowd in private investment, in this way, reversing the declining trend of potential output growth.

This paper presents an overview of different models which explain financial crises, with the aim of understanding economic developments during and possibly after the Great Recession. In the first part approaches based on efficient markets and rational expectations hypotheses are analyzed, which however do not give any explanation for the occurrence of financial crises and thus cannot suggest any remedies for the present situation. A broad range of theoretical approaches analyzing financial crises from a medium term perspective is then discussed. Within this group we focused on the insights of Marx, Schumpeter, Wicksell, Hayek, Fisher, Keynes, Minsky, and Kindleberger. Subsequently the contributions of the Regulation School, the approach of Social Structures of Accumulation and Post-Keynesian approach, which focus on long-term developments and regime shifts in capitalist development, are presented. International approaches to finance and financial crises are integrated into the analyses. We address the issue of relevance of all these theories for the present crisis and draw some policy implications. The paper has the aim to find out to which extent the different approaches are able to explain the Great Recession, what visions they develop about future development of capitalism and to which extent these different approaches can be synthesized.

This note, by Theresa Neef, Panayiotis Nicolaides, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, and Gabriel Zucman, provides data on wealth inequality in Russia and advocates for a European Asset Registry.

Neue Eurokrise?! In diesem RROKLA-Artikel untersuchen Etienne Schneider und Felix Syrovatka die Entwicklungen seit der vergangenen Eurokrise und beschreiben drei Szenarien für die Zukunft der Eurozone bereithält.

Kilian de Ridder argumentiert in diesem Text, dass die EZB in ihrer aktuellen Konstruktion eine Institution ist, die aus heute überholten Theorien heraus entstanden ist. Die EZB hat das Mandat der Preisstabilität, was bedeutet, sie zielt auf eine niedrige, aber positive Inflation von 2 Prozent ab. Das hauptsächliche Instrument, das wir ihr für die Erfüllung dieses Mandats an die Hand gegeben haben, ist der Leitzins. Dieser stellt sich als überraschend unpraktisch für dieses Ziel heraus, weil er keine spezifischen Sektoren adressieren kann, sondern nur die gesamte Wirtschaft.

After a brief illustration of sovereign green bonds’ features, this paper describes the market evolution and identifies the main benefits and costs for sovereign issuers. The financial performance of these securities is then analysed.