IAN LAVERY MP warns that decades of neoliberal policies have left former industrial communities behind — but a renewed Labour commitment to working people could change the political landscape
ECONOMIST Heather Stewart last week referred to the 2007 sub-prime mortgage crash and its aftermath as “the latest in a series of periodic convulsions in modern capitalism.” She had no doubt that “a fresh crisis looms.”
She linked this prospect to warnings in recent days from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United Nations’s trade and development arm UNCTAD. A specific fear is that speculative money which “swills unchecked around the world,” may be abruptly withdrawn from these countries. The fear stems from the protracted recent fall in global commodity prices and the connected slowdown in weaker economies.
The possibility of increased global interest rates, for six years rejected as an option, only enhances this fear. Fellow economist Larry Elliott wrote in Monday’s Guardian that the IMF message to Europe and Japan is “to print some more money,” as raising interest rates could have “nasty spillover effects around the rest of the world.”
The social base of the old Tory Party has disappeared as surely as that of Labour, argues ANDREW MURRAY – today’s right are the debased offspring of a capitalism that speculates without investing and profits without producing
Friedrich Merz’s call for a new Plaza Accord ignores how Washington’s 1985 currency ambush destroyed Japan without fixing US deficits — China, a sovereign socialist state with 1.4 billion consumers, cannot be bullied the same way, writes CARLOS MARTINEZ
Western nations’ increasingly aggressive stance is not prompted by any increase in security threats against these countries — rather, it is caused by a desire to bring about regime changes against governments that pose a threat to the hegemony of imperialism, writes PRABHAT PATNAIK
CAROL WILCOX argues for the proper implementation of the land value tax, which could see unused plots sold off and landlords priced out of landlordism, potentially resolving the housing and planning crises


