FX & Imperialism
What affects the exchange rate of a country’s currency? The answer depends on where that country stands in the world economy. Not simply because an exchange rate is the value of one currency versus another, so that you must weigh …
World Power
Some of these ways are obvious, for example, using military power to force another country to submit. Many are not, especially those that are linked into the system that envelops the world economy. Five dimensions of international power can be …
China & US Power
Can China do much to fight back against the power wielded by the US in the world economy? At first sight, that looks unlikely. China is big, but world trade is conducted in dollars, and the US has economic, political …
FX & Imperialism
What affects the exchange rate of a country’s currency? The answer depends on where that country stands in the world economy. Not simply because an exchange rate is the value of one currency versus another, so that you must weigh …
Index of Power Update, 2018-19: China #2
his is an update of the statistics for my Index of Power, using data for 2018-19 and discussing what a country’s ranking reflects. The major change is that China’s rank has shifted up and it has now taken the UK’s …
Finance, Imperialism and Profits
Last Friday I took part in a panel to launch a new book, World in Crisis: A Global Analysis of Marx’s Law of Profitability, published by Haymarket Books, edited by Michael Roberts and Guglielmo Carchedi. The presentation was at this …
Bitcoin: a Digital Alternative?
I first paid little attention to Bitcoin, thinking that there are probably more Elvis Presley impersonators than there are people in the world who have traded or owned it. But seeing that central banks have issued policy statements on Bitcoin, …
Value of Labour-Power, Wages, Productivity and Imperialism
These are notes from, and for, a series of discussions on imperialism organised by Redline. (See here for other details) As such, they are not a fully rounded analysis, just some guidance on points in these debates. ————— A key point …
Index of Power
The following chart gives a snapshot of the top 20 countries, ranked by their index of power in the world economy. Readers of this blog or my book, The City, will have seen this concept before,[1] but here the information …
Google Eyed
The Hoover Company’s vacuum cleaners once so dominated its market that people often still describe using any make of vacuum cleaner as ‘hoovering up’. Similarly, people ‘Google’ information from the Internet, even if they do not use Google. The only …
Facebook’s Advertising Machine
When Mark Zuckerberg is interviewed, the founder of Facebook can barely put a sentence together without using the word ‘connect’. This looks like a case of Tourette’s syndrome that spouts business buzz words not curses. But it is based on …
Amazon: Becoming the Market
Amazon’s business operations highlight many of the paradoxes of modern imperialism. It provides an efficient delivery of a wide range of goods and services to satisfied customers, but the workers involved in the process are stretched to the limit, and …