Economics

Montevideo – In 2002, Anne Krueger, First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), floated the idea that countries can go bust, advanced her opinion about a possible international mechanism of sovereign debt restructuring, and when considering the obstacles to an orderly debt restructuring, explicitly mentioned the behavior of vulture funds.

The Occupy movement continues to expand its influence and develop awareness in different fronts. Harvard Economics students decide to raise the issue of what kind of models are taught and what has been the influence of such models in the creation of the present international crisis. Professor teaches “Neo-Kensyan”(!?) doctrine but students describe it as neo-liberal

With two years of failed plans, pseudo-plans and announcements of plans, Europe has acquired a huge pile of debt and a decade of agony.

Here we give publication to the complete letter we received from our friend Pedro Páez, at the moment in which he concluded his
duties as President of the Ecuadorian Presidential Technical Commission
for the New International Financial Architecture, to which he were appointed by the Ecuatorian President Mr. Rafael Correa.

We reproduce here a report from the [Robin Hood Tax](http://robinhoodtax.org/latest/g20-verdict) campaign website in relation to the meeting of the G20. Who supports it, who will try to block it and how it could help the Eurozone emerge from its current crisis. As even some bankers are now talking about being responsible, the momentum for this tax keeps growing.

While European politicians are spending millions of euro on never-ending summits to seek the best way how to further fund their banks through new re-capitalisation plans, cooperatives silently gather over 800 million people in 100 countries, employing more than 100 million persons worldwide—that’s 20% more than the multinationals, without due attention from politicians.

Smallholder farmers, who produce up to 80 per cent of all food in some areas, mainly in Africa, “face the risk of exploitation under contract farming arrangements with processing or marketing companies,” according to UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, who presented his annual report to the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee

Richard Wilkinson, Professor Emeritus of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, explains in a TED session how inequality harms society, not just the poor but also the rich. Not a moment too soon, in order to add to the discussion taking place globally by the Occupy/Indignados/ArabSpring movement about setting the basis of a new society.

The system of debt continues to devastate the lives of people around the world. People in the South face the daily impacts and consequences of the financial indebtedness of their countries, which far from having been “relieved” is growing in step with the crisis and the pursuit of extraordinary profits by the most concentrated forms of capital.

The similarities between our present behaviour toward the almighty Markets and our ancestors’ toward their rather difficult to please gods could not be more obvious. We build Temples (Banks) to them, we obey their Priests (Economists) and we make sacrifices (health, education, welfare) to appease them. But the marble gods crumbled anyway; and Europe should learn from its past.