Global trade hierarchies across two eras of globalization

During the first era of globalization (1870–1913), the global division of labor was stark. Britain and other Western nations largely produced manufactured goods, but they also exported a whole range of temperate agricultural goods like wheat, beef and barley. Elsewhere in the European colonial empires, products like cotton, cocoa and coffee were exported, often at very low prices and sometimes with forced labor, to sate a growing demand in the global economic core for tropical luxuries. More than a century has passed since World War I heralded the collapse of this world order. Today, the globalization wave that has shaped the world since the 1980s is ebbing.

What is the legacy of the First Globalization of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries on the economic fortunes of countries during the Second Globalization? To what extent have countries’ positions in the international economic order been persistent across the two globalizations, with some trapped at the bottom and others comfortably on top?

Cheap money will boost inequality and geopolitical tension but not inflation

Though the lockdown in 2020 threw many workers out of work, the big fiscal stimulus, fueled by government debt and an unprecedentedly large monetary expansion, offered stimulus checks and elevated unemployment benefits to millions of Americans. In 2020, US federal spending grew by 50 percent, making the deficit share of GDP the largest since 1945, and the M2 in the economy grew by 26 percent—the largest annual increase since 1943. Such fiscal and monetary expansion prevented a collapse in consumption. After an initial fall in Spring 2020, US household consumption bounced back and grew by more than 40 percent in the third quarter.

Inflation, wages, and the fifty-year crisis

In one of her first statements as Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen said that the United States faced “an economic crisis that has been building for fifty years.” The formulation is intriguing but enigmatic. The last half-century is piled so high with economic wreckage that it is not obvious how to name the long crisis, much less how to pull the fragments together into a narrative. One place to start is with the distribution of national income between labor and capital (or, looked at another way, between the wage share and the profit share of national income). About fifty years ago, the share of income going to labor began to decline, forming a statistical record of the epochal collapse of working class power. Episodes of high employment in the 1990s and the late 2010s did not reverse the long-term pattern. Even today, with a combination of easy money and fiscal stimulus unprecedented since World War II, it is unclear what it would take to reverse the trend in distribution.

How the Great Recession fueled the student debt crisis

The geographic character of the Great Recession is, at this point, well-known. While everywhere in the United States experienced a sharp increase in unemployment, some areas suffered disproportionate exposure of local employment in harder-hit industries.

The Great Recession is also substantially at fault for the student debt crisis, and the geographic contours of the downturn carry implications for how student debt has subsequently been experienced throughout the country. The number of borrowers and average loan balances were increasing rapidly before the onset of the financial crisis, thanks to the defunding of public university systems following the previous cyclical downturn in the early 2000s. The Great Recession put those trends into overdrive: with fewer jobs available and a more selective labor market, many young people were funneled into a higher education system already in the process of becoming much more dependent on students and their families paying hefty tuition, as opposed to state support. Those who had entered the system seeking credentials to boost their chances in the labor market then graduated (or didn’t graduate) into a labor market still suffering from stagnant wages and disappearing job opportunities. Credentialization cascaded into higher loan balances as a share of income, rising delinquency, and eventually declining repayment rates.

Trade, bond markets, and the Ever Given

Why did the Ever Given capture our collective imaginations? At the end of its week in the spotlight, the poet Kamran Javadizadeh wrote: “I too am ‘partially refloated,’ I too remain stuck in the Suez Canal.” Two fluorescent yellow-vested construction workers with an excavator—lego-like compared to the gargantuan hulk of the vessel—attempted to wrench the giant ship from the sand bank. Dredgers and tugboats aided by rising tides finally refloated the massive freighter, launching it back on its voyage from Yantian to Rotterdam.

Market makers and risk managers after 2008

In the 1945 film It’s a Wonderful Life, banker protagonist George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart) struggles to exchange his well-functioning loans for cash. He lacks convertibility—known as liquidity risk in modern finance—and so cannot pay impatient depositors. Like any traditional financial intermediary, Bailey seeks to transform short-term debts (deposits) into long-term assets (loans). In the eyes of traditional macroeconomics, a run on the bank could be prevented if Bailey had borrowed money from the Fed, and used the bank’s assets as collateral. In the late-nineteenth-century, British journalist Walter Bagehot argued that the Fed acts as a “lender of last resort,” injecting liquidity into the banking system. As long as a bank was perceived solvent, then, its access to the Fed’s credit facilities would be almost guaranteed. In an economy like the one in It's A Wonderful Life, the primary question was whether people could get their money out in the case of a crisis. And for a long time, Bagehot’s rule, “lend freely, against good collateral, but at a high rate,” maintained the Fed’s control over the money market and helped end banking panics and systemic banking crises.

This control evaporated on September 15, 2008, with Lehman Brothers’ collapse. On that day, an enormous spike in interbank lending rates was caused not by a run on a bank, but by the failure of an illiquid securities dealer.

A proposal for a public ratings agency for green finance

The Biden administration has committed the United States to cutting its carbon emissions in half by 2030 and achieving net zero emissions by 2050. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimates that the global transition to a low-carbon future will require \$131 trillion in infrastructure investment by 2050. With the US share of global GDP and carbon emissions around 16 percent, a back-of-the-envelope calculation puts its gross financing needs at roughly \$21 trillion—or 100 percent of GDP over the next three decades. In other words: approximately 3.3 percent of GDP per annum in investment has to be financed to achieve Biden’s commitments. But the aggregate climate-related financing promised by the twin bills introduced by Biden is no more than \$100 billion, or 0.5 percent of GDP per year over the next eight years. How is the rest going to be financed?

Reconstructing the RFC

Like the world system as a whole, segregated cities in the United States have their own finance driven core-periphery dynamics. The world economy is structured by countries with competitive export sectors and trade surpluses, like Germany and China, who exhibit underconsumption and excess savings; the US's debt-fueled economy receives these savings through its domination of global financial markets. The dynamic strengthens the power of global finance at the expense of wages and living standards. And within the US, the allocation of credit and investment has exacerbated racial disparities and altered the municipal geography of debt. At the level of the city and the financial system, these developments warrant a powerful political response. But what form can that response take?

On Spain's transition from dictatorship to constitutional monarchy

It’s been some time since the term “transition” was fully incorporated into day-to-day usage in contemporary Spanish. It refers to the process of political change that began during the second half of the 1970s, a process which transformed Spain from the Franco dictatorship to the parliamentary monarchy that governs the country today. The term was coined in the midst of the dictatorship, as if in its invocation it could foreshadow the horizon of its disintegration. It succeeded in connoting the way in which one regime gave way to another—not a violent cut, nor a democratic breakdown in the strict sense. Instead, it was a process negotiated by the leaders who had inherited the state apparatus of the dictatorship, and the leaders of the parties of the democratic opposition. While the first aimed to assert the weight, however trivial, of an obsolete and precarious power structure, the second aimed to channel the democratic impulse of a significant section of Spanish society.

That latter section was composed of men and women who resisted through illegal parties and organized social movements (worker’s movements, neighborhood associations, student unions, and feminist groups) capable of breaking the public order and revealing, between the cracks of the regime, the new alternatives. In their day to day, they developed forms of political participation, experimentation, and cultural innovation which themselves detracted from Franco’s hold on the popular imagination. In many ways, these early experiences were much more profound than the institutional restructuring later termed the transition. From this angle, the transition can be understood as a sfumato, that is to say, not only the fading of dictatorship into democracy, but as a sum of experiential layers each contributing to its atmosphere and offering a depth that we’ve yet to fully grasp.The interviews with Felipe González, Begoña San Jose, and Héctor Maravall contained in this book capture the texture of this historical moment.

On the other side of this politically active reality stood another very diverse and wide sector of society, predisposed to the consensus they were socialized into under Francoism. They were motivated by a timid desire for change, as well as by a deep fear of its consequences. Under- standing the Spanish transition requires gaining an awareness of these inherited social habits which were highly structured by authoritarianism, and the survival of its repressive legal, bureaucratic, and media institutions. It also requires acknowledging an international framework in which any action on the margin of society was limited by the areas of political influence that defined the Cold War period.

But understanding the transition also requires capturing that organic crisis in existing relations of power, the intuitive and automatic social responses which enhanced the appeal of new cultural attitudes and expanded the scope for political action. The much cited phrase of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán—which explains the negotiations behind the changing regime as “an alignment of weaknesses”—is useful if we recognize that, in moments of crisis, any alignment of forces is unstable and fragile. Understood through its underlying estatism, “an alignment of weaknesses” is a declaration that the transition happened in the only way that it could have. It’s an argument in which the real is transformed into the rational, the rational into the optimal, and the optimal into the venerable. But we know that narratives of the past tend to perform this argumentative transposition in the opposite direction: it is from the veneration of the present that earlier events are arranged in a way that inevitably leads towards some determined destiny.

The Rise and Fall of the French Road to Socialism

The history of French socialism is filled with famous and heroic dates: 1789; 1848; 1871 1936; 1968. But less well remembered is another date of great significance: 1981. It was in May of that year that the French left achieved its greatest electoral triumph of the postwar era, with the election of Socialist Party (PS) leader François Mitterrand as President of the Republic. That victory, which came after a quarter century of uninterrupted conservative rule, raised hopes for a new departure in French politics. Mitterrand’s election manifesto, the 110 Propositions for France, embodied the sweeping reform agenda he had promised since ascending to the leadership of the PS a decade earlier, when he memorably capped his speech at the Party’s 1971 Congress with a thunderous call for a “rupture” with capitalism. As head of the PS, Mitterrand’s decision to pursue an electoral agreement with his long-time his rivals from the Communist Party (PCF), which resulted in the 1972 “Common Program,” was both a milestone for the postwar French left, and an important step in his own rise to the Élysée Palace.

Mitterrand’s election in the spring of 1981, and the subsequent triumph of the left in parliamentary elections which followed immediately afterwards, led to the formation of a government under Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy that was more radical than any France had seen since Léon Blum’s Popular Front in 1936. For the first time since the start of the Cold War, Mauroy’s cabinet included four communist ministers.