Last week, the – 2025 Canadian federal election – was held and the Liberal Party won for the fourth consecutive time securing 169 seats (in the 343-seat House of Commons), just short of a majority. They also won the popular vote (43.7 per cent of the vote – up 11.1 per cent), which was the…
US economy
People are closely watching the US data at present to see what the impacts of the recent tariff decisions by the new US President might have. I am no exception. Yesterday (April 30, 2025), the US Bureau of Economic Analysis published the latest US National Accounts figures – Gross Domestic Product, 1st Quarter 2025 (Advance…
Soon after the US President announced – Liberation Day tariffs – I wrote this blog post – US government is pinning its tariff hopes on some unlikely to be realised assumptions (April 7, 2025) – to help readers understand what logic there was, if any, in the decision by the American government to impose wide-ranging…
It’s obviously becoming difficult to keep track of where the US government policy is on any particular day. Last week, it was ‘Liberation Day’, which included tariffs being imposed on remote penguin colonies in the back of nowhere, then Musk labelling the Trump’s trade adviser ‘dumber than a sack of bricks’, then tariffs on Chinese…
Last week, the US President honoured his election promise, indeed his long-held commitment, to increase tariffs on imported goods and services to the US. The formula they came up to differentiate between countries was bizarre but I don’t intend commenting on that here, except to say, the imposition of tariffs on the – Heard Island…
The Post WW2 period was marked by the mass consumption boom and the rise of the ‘middle class’, which is a sociological designation that is intended to say that the working class had segments that had experienced better conditions and outcomes than the labouring cohorts. The fact that Capital (as a class) deigned to concede…
This week, Australia learned that old geopolitical relationships and so-called ‘free trade’ treaties mean little when it comes to US policy. The obsequious way our political class fawns after the US has been a constant sickening element of our national identity for as long as I can recall. When I was a child, we were…
The last several decades of what is termed the neoliberal era has led to some fundamental changes in our social and economic institutions. It was led by the interests of capital reconfiguring what the polity should be doing, given that most of the significant shifts have come through the legislative or regulative capacity (power) of…
So from January 20, 2025, Donald Trump will inherit the on-going genocide that the US government has been party to in the Middle East. He will then have no cover and will be judged accordingly. What follows are a few thoughts that I had when I watched the unfolding disaster for the Democrats and the…
A government cannot run continuous fiscal deficits! Yes it can. How? You need to understand what a deficit is and how it arises to answer that. But isn’t a fiscal surplus the norm that governments should aspire to? Why frame the question that way? Why not inquire into and understand that it is all about…