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A genuinely democratic debate on the CMU cannot shy away from looking into what securitization really is about: making profit out of people’s debts.

Broadening the debt-led accumulation system means that claims on future income and production are used to solve today’s problems while lessons learnt from past crises are wilfully ignored.

The political project to erect a Capital Markets Union (CMU) could be the dawn of a new era of financial (re)deregulation in Europe.

Drawing on rhetoric of resilient markets and the need for diversity, the European Commission is pushing for a capital markets union to extend market-based finance in the EU. This move risks marginalizing current attempts to control the potential f...

The stepping up of the capital market-based financial system and consequent financial liberalization is neither necessary nor desirable.

Does Europe’s reignited love affair with the financial sector come at the price of a divorce from its commitments to climate change, development and human rights?

Critiquing the Capital Markets Union plan is invaluable, but only effective as part of a larger critique on the historical, anti-democratic form of European integration.

Is the current recovery policy for the financial and economic crises in the Eurozone a genuine answer for the complexity and diversity of the problems that all member states face? Not really. The responses are too one-sided and mainly export and a...

Governments should not hesitate to visibly and accountably occupy their empty seat in the cockpit of the financial system. In our new research article 'The licence to create money' we explore the alternatives to what is currently at the heart of t...

Private banks create most of our money. The rest – coins and banknotes – make up only a small percentage. Several recent developments challenge this historically-evolved arrangement. Monetary reform could be as urgent as preventing the next bankin...

While inequality is the flipside of the ‘squeezed-out middle’, the trends affecting the middle class and inequality are inextricably bound up with changes in the labour market in Europe.

The much-debated squeeze of the middle class in Europe is real, but very different from country to country. The squeeze is felt most in the countries most affected by the financial crisis, like Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece, where austerity me...

You can read it in the newspapers every day: national economies are not creating enough jobs and fewer quality jobs in the productive sectors. Globalization, automation and financialization of the economy have been identified as the drivers of cur...

The stagnation in labour demand in the US is linked to the rise of finance. Strategies to encourage long-term employment growth must be found in that direction too.

Volatile capital flows have maintained, if not exacerbated, the vulnerability of developing and emerging countries and affected domestic productivity and employment.

In many countries the share of labour in national income has declined over the last three decades. As a result, the low and middle-income groups of people who depend the most on wages for their income are crumbling. Meanwhile, the rich elites who...

If there is one thing that must be done, then that is to cancel the public debts of developing countries.

Although the MDGs are arguably the most politically important pact ever made for international development, they harbor several lessons for their successor framework.

A green transformation should be a core element of the post-2015 agenda and achieving it will depend on whether we will be able to create the knowledge needed.

Will the BRICS Development Bank’s constructive capacities overcome its destructive ones? The world is watching.

There is a common tendency to view growth and equity as competing goals, including by many of those who have strong concerns about the latter. This is unfortunate since it is likely to lead to bad policy and horrible politics.

The blog ‘Current Global Affairs’ provides a window for reflection on news events, topical issues and developments. The blog focuses on the wider implications of current affairs, beyond the immediate impact of events as-they-unfold. Would you like...

The Global Green New Deal aims to stimulate economic recovery and reduce environmental degradation and poverty. But it will only succeed if the Group of Twenty commit to global governance and mobilize international support.

The financial crisis has prompted a discussion on the re-structuring of the world’s financial system. 

The decisions that are made in the autumn of 2009 will shape Europe’s international role in the future.